Italy's Postcolonial "Question': Views from the Southern Frontier of Europe

In Italy, like in many other European countries, cultural roots and national identity are currently shifting as the result of contemporary transnational migrations and globalization. This essay analyses how the paradigm emerging from the Italian national case contributes to a redefinition of the postcolonial canon centered on British history and culture and to the notion of a European postcolonial as a whole. To this aim, the authors identify in colonial history and contemporary immigration the threads that connect the postcoloniality of Italy to that of other European countries. At the same time, they locate the specificity of the Italian postcolonial in the intersection between these factors and other events in Italian history that have strongly influenced the process of shaping an Italian national identity: the Southern question, intranational and international mass emigrations, new mobilities, the subaltern position of Italy within the European Union, and the geopolitical dislocation of Italy as the Southern frontier of Europe. The authors close their essay by presenting a Mediterranean Southern perspective grounded in new forms of knowledge and aesthetic sensibilities that counteract Europe's sense of encroaching and its politics of border protection.