Interrupted Narratives And Intersectional Representations In Italian Postcolonial Literature PDF Download

This study adopts a postcolonial approach to literary criticism by tracing the ghosts of Italy's colonial past to contemporary constructions of race, gender, and nationality and by considering how these persistent hierarchies are inscribed on the bodies of the protagonists in Italian postcolonial literature by Carla Macoggi, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, and Igiaba Scego. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the psychoaffective consequences of hereditary colonial power dynamics on the Black female diaspora protagonists, a theoretical framework which is referred to as "postcolonial pathology." Adapted for the Italian context from Ann Cvetkovich's concept of "political depression" in Depression: A Public Feeling (2012) which attributes depression to failed politics, and Good et al.'s conceptualization of "social suffering" in Postcolonial Disorders (2008) as an expected response to "disordered states," the notion of postcolonial pathology argues that positionality has affective sequelae: the multitude of mental illnesses which manifest in the novels' protagonists are owed to the failed decolonization process in Italy which began with a suppression of its colonial history and its later mythologization which was necessary to reify the implausible construct of the Italian nation itself with its millennia-long fragmentary past. The heredity of its colonial past manifests yet today in essentialist representations of Italianness which have injurious effects on the lived social, political, and psychological experience of the Other. This study focuses on the detrimental impact of lingering colonial power relations during a critical period of development when the child and adolescent protagonists are constructing their very notion of self. Frantz Fanon's theory of the "epidermalizing" mirror of racism, Kelly Oliver's paradigm of the "reversed mirror stage," and Michelle Wright's notion of the erasure of the Black female even in counter-discourses are enlisted. The selected texts of Italian postcolonial literature demonstrate that the distorted mirrors of race, gender, and the myth of the ethnic homogeneity of the Western European nation disrupt identity formation in the black female diaspora protagonists. As such, the narratives are framed as inverted Bildungsroman which recount the deformation of the youths' sense of self, thus resulting in grave psychopathy.