Abstract

In a world that is becoming progressively more globalized, literature is no longer, and can never again be, a "national" literature. The path leading from decolonization to the present day has seen literary texts created in all parts of the world which were inspired early on by reflections on Négritude and by the poetics of "resistance" to colonizing cultures. Now this literature has evolved into the fascinating "migrant" writings of both men and women who, for diverse reasons, live in transnational and hybrid cultures. Important scholars of postcolonial studies (Mouralis, Anderson, Spivak, Bhabha, Said, Chambers, Appadurai, Moura), building on Gramsci's lucid insights, have little by little analyzed this boundless and multiform reality, offering a range of interpretative models (cultural métissage, generic hybridization, transgenre, cultural hybridity, diffused modernity, liquidity, subalternity, imagined communities, border writing, non-places, in-between) which have proven quite useful for the analysis of these texts. All literary production in European languages (including, today, even in Italian) is conducive to the idea that new frontiers are outlined in literature and that, as Glissant hoped, the reader can read the world "in other ways" in the pages of migrant writers. Thus remembering Todorov's advice, even in this unsettled age, it is perhaps worth continuing to feed on literature in spite of everything, hoping to give new life to human civilization.