Titolo della tesi: Reading the Post-migrant: Reinterpreting Migrant Literature in Scandinavia
Emilio Calvani
Advisor: Prof. Bruno Berni
Co-Advisor: Prof. Helena Březinová
Abstract
Reading the Post-migrant: Reinterpreting Migrant Literature in Scandinavia.
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, migration has played an increasingly important and pervasive role in Western societies. The current globalizing network that interconnects distant places allows people, information, and images to move with greater speed and ease. This varied flow of movement has also had radical demographic repercussions over time. More and more people are moving from the Global South to the Global North in search of better prospects, thus giving rise to new generations of individuals whose life experiences fade the boundaries between local and global, nation and world. This posits the very concept of migration, in the different declinations and forms in which it manifests itself daily, as one of the cornerstones for understanding contemporaneity.
At the same time, the strategies by which societies themselves interpret and modulate metanarrative processes to present themselves often relegate such realities to a secondary position. Such processes, in fact, tend to marginalize all those voices that set out to narrate intertwined cultures, languages, and identities and, consequently, to include the perspective of migration in the description of a reality increasingly open to external influences. The result of such marginalization is the creation of parallel societies within the same space and the polarization of opposing anthropological categories such as migrant and non-migrant. This is the case that characterizes the countries of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Here, migratory flows have maintained a similar pace since the 1950s, making the three countries a multiethnic and multicultural reservoir over time. The social condition of these countries, which can be defined as ‘post-migrant’, gives rise today to an authentic social rift, which identifies the phenomenon of migration as an extremely divisive topic both in terms of political debate and artistic representation.
It is precisely the concept of ‘post-migration’, coined in the early 2000s by Shermin Langhoff, a Turkish-born German theater director, that functions as the main theoretical framework for this work. Post-migration aims to guide the perspective of analysis toward a whole range of effects, contradictions, and processes of socio-cultural renegotiation that take place after migration has occurred. By directing attention toward the artistic-literary representation of that social condition, the study of those voices that are labeled as external to the dominant culture proves to be a necessary exercise. The aim of this thesis, therefore, is to examine various aspects, such as language, belonging, and identity, taking into account how migration affects their development in the countries of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Through the analysis of a corpus of literary works produced by authors born or raised in Scandinavian countries, the goal is to glimpse into the life experiences of a wide range of individuals, whose stories are intertwined in different ways with the phenomenon of migration.
The analysis of literary works that narrate the Scandinavian post-migrant condition can offer a different perspective on a range of social, cultural, and artistic realities that have not yet been sufficiently explored.