Overview

The first study of Anglophone and Italian novels by Somali diasporic authors, offering a new critical framework for multilingual and transnational analysis of Somali literature. Building on the latest scholarship about multilingual contexts, diaspora studies and the rapidly expanding field of Italian postcolonial studies, Marco Medugno examines Somali diasporic literature with a comparative perspective. Considering works written in English and Italian, he argues that Somali diasporic authors share similar themes and aesthetics, thus creating an interliterary community within the diaspora space. By using multilingualism as a starting point, Medugno provides significant insights into how Somali national and individual identities are constructed in diasporic, global contexts through geography, style, form, language and the re-writing of national histories emerging out of colonization and independence. Analysing acclaimed Somali novels such as Nuruddin Farah’s Links and Crossbones, Igiaba Scego’s Adua and Cristina Ali Farah’s Little Mother, he questions any definition of ‘local’ as ‘provincial’, instead considering it a site for interrogating global concerns. Literature of the Somali Diaspora is organized around three themes: spatiality, language and resistance help to contextualize authors, forced by the decades-long Somali Civil War, to write outside Somalia and in different languages – including Somali, Italian, English, German, Dutch and Arabic – within global literary circuits. Their work thus creates a literature not confined within national borders but an interliterary global community, a transnational and multilingual space in which they share world aesthetic ideologies, challenge and engage with literary traditions in different languages and show an interplay between diverse cultures.

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Reviews

Through vast worldwide intertextual webs of diasporic Italophone and Anglophone Somali writing, Marco Medugno shows how postcolonial fiction exposes erased Italian colonial history, engaging a transnational aesthetic constituted through translanguaged narratives. This study effectively combines close and distant reading to make an important contribution in the fields of postcolonial literature and linguistics, and studies of diaspora and spatiality. * F. Fiona Moolla, Professor of English, University of the Western Cape, South Africa * With Literature of the Somali Diaspora, Medugno offers a fresh and original perspective for delving into the novels written by Somali diasporic authors in both English and Italian. This ambitious and timely book provides rich materials and insightful critical reflections, emphasizing the urgency of examining the implications of Somali migration across national borders and languages. * Simone Brioni, Associate Professor of English, Stony Brook University, USA * Deeply and imaginatively researched, Medugno’s book identifies transnational, translocal, transtemporal and multilingual relations in recent novels by Somali diasporic authors, disclosing intense and sometimes surprising dialogues between writers and traditions that challenge postcolonial paradigms. It offers readers vital instruments for understanding the ways in which literature actually works in global context today. * Jennifer Burns, Professor of Italian Studies, University of Warwick, UK *

Author Information

Marco Medugno is Associate Lecturer at Newcastle University, UK. He has published articles in journals of both Italian and Postcolonial studies, including From the European South and Italian Studies in Southern Africa.

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