‘Italians like what?’ The new faces of cross-cultural autobiographical writing and migration

Abstract

The present contribution is based on previous critical reflections and interventions on autobiographical writing in the field of transcultural and migration literature, in Italy and abroad, and intends to provide an update about further developments in this area, regarding specifically the latest decade. At its core, we find the corpus-body of “new Italians” and their self-representations in a variety of literary and artistic fields (pamphlets, autobiographic novels, comics, popular music, blogs). The critical crossing of this corpus in fact highlights the need to rethink the autobiographical macro-genre as an increasingly hybrid and polymorphic field, on the one hand, and requires updated and flexible keys to interpret adequately these representations of self as intelligences, bodies, hybrid identities, creativity in search of a “narrative community” (P. Jedlowski) with which to dialogue. The theoretical and methodological tools used in this reading and listening course are those of imagology, as well as media and culture studies.