Counter-canonical Aesthetics in Postcolonial Italian Literature and Cinema

This article reflects on the problematic relationship between Italian citizens and globalization’s migrants. In some previous essays, I focused on the imprisoned and spectralised condition of these migrants and on the ways in which intercultural forms of teaching express an urge to tackle the fractures of postcolonial Italy through a breaking of traditional moulds of pedagogical practices. Here I deal with the aesthetics of postcolonial Italian literature and cinema in their attempts at recomposing what Iain Chambers calls “interrupted modernity”. I start from Italian migrant (or ‘postcolonial’) literature, a fast developing area of study that is still in progress (Andall and Duncan; Comberiati). Its acknowledged tendency to straddle between genres and languages and to question the fixity of critical paradigms leads to the construction of a “counter-canon” (Venturini) and to its “counter-hegemonic position” (Ponzanesi), thus offering opportunities for creating spaces of resistance against processes of subordination and fragmentation. With regard to this, I take as my case study Wu Ming’s short story “Momodou”, which narrates the killing of an African migrant by a policeman from the ending to the beginning, in a significant reversal of stylistic standards that unveils the constructedness of official versions. I then move from the written word to films, in order to verify the modalities in which Italian migrant cinema narrates the fractures of postcolonial Italy. In films such as Augugliaro, Del Grande and Al Nassiry’s Io sto con la sposa (2014), I investigate an overlapping of fiction and reality where the presence of the real is made inescapably concrete by the over-exposition of the fictionality of narration. This coexistence of fiction and reality is shown to be paralleled by metamorphic and fluid conceptions of physical spaces, similarly to the borderline and liminal condition of many of the migrant characters of these works. Here I take as my case study Olmi’s film Il villaggio di cartone (2011), which narrates the transformation of a church into a shelter for refugees in order to reach the core of religious values and practice. Finally, I examine Gaglianone’s La mia classe (2013), where a class of migrants studying Italian is constantly disrupted by the pressures exercised by postcolonial society: society’s and educational spaces overlap, just as the film is founded on a constant swinging between a fictional class and the reality of the non-professional migrant actors (further enhanced by the explicit intrusions of the filming crew).