Postcolonial Italy ─ Challenging National Homogeneity

This path-breaking volume addresses the postcolonial condition as one of the main factors that affects lives and shapes cultures in contemporary Italy. The collection identifies the common, postcolonial context in which a wide array of discourses, social practices, and cultural production are finding expression in the peninsula. The innovative approach of the book is not limited to the exploration of the relationship between former colonizers and colonized, nor is it confined to a rereading of colonial history and culture; rather, it considers how the postcolonial paradigm formulates new epistemologies, while at the same time examining the relationships of power created by colonialism and reproduced and reinforced in contemporary postcolonial societies.

Cristina Lombardi-Diop is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Women's Studies and Gender Studies and in Modern Languages and Literatures at Loyola University, Chicago, USA. She is Editor and translator of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Moving the Center (2000) and editor of Gabriella Ghermandi's Regina di fiori e di perle (2007). Her essays on white femininity and colonialism, African Italian diasporic literature, and space and migration have appeared in edited collections and journals such as Italian Culture, Romance Language Annuals, Afriche e Orienti, and Interventions. Her book, Bianco e nero: Storia dell'identitA razziale degli italiani, is forthcoming for Le Monnier in 2013.

Caterina Romeo is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Rome 'Sapienza', Italy. She is the author of Narrative tra due sponde: Memoir di italiane d'America (2005) and has co-edited a double monographic issue of Dialectical Anthropology on contemporary migrations in Europe and a monographic issue of tutteStorie on Italian American women authors. She has translated into Italian the work of numerous Italian American women writers, among them Louise DeSalvo's Vertigo (2006) and Kym Ragusa's The Skin between Us (2008).