Deterritorializing the Nation-Based Approach to Literature or the Transnational Dimension of Italian Literature

A growing attention has been paid in contemporary scholarship by literary theory to literary works published by translingual authors working in a condition of migration and/or diaspora through different languages and/or national and cultural contexts. This contribution deals with literary theory and historiography's difficulties to account for the space/s where diaspora literary discourses can be considered, or simply be studied by means of critical paradigms that may need points of comparison among different diaspora literature case studies in different cultural and national contexts. The concept of nation will be used in a dynamic way by juxtaposing and confronting it to the notions of trans-nation – post-nation – globalization – glocalization – world literature, etc. Migration literature, on the other hand, asks for a re-definition of the literary systems in Europe, hence there might be a need to revise or/and change the notions of national literature. In the case of Italy, the immigrant translingual writers from other European countries and other continents are going to reverse the commonplace of national Italian literature as aboriginal cultural space. All this means that we will have to tackle the incongruity between the status of contemporary literature in Italy and the 19th-Century monolingual and mono-cultural national paradigm on which national literary historiography is still based.