Reading the Discourse of Multicultural Italy: Promises and Challenges of Transnational Italy in an Era of Global Migration

This article argues that while the transformation of Italy from an emigrant to an immigrant country has yet to be translated into a serious reassessment of the civic and legal foundations governing citizenship and nationality, migrant narratives give voice to experiences common to generations of Italians, thus facilitating the recovery of the repressed texts of Italy's own colonial and migrant past. In particular, more recently established authors debunk homogeneous, normative models of Italian-ness and join the reconsideration of Italy's hybrid Mediterranean identity that is traversing the works of well-established autochthonous voices.