Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Re-writing history in the literature of the Ethiopian diaspora in Italy

Marzagora, Sara

Authors

Sara Marzagora



Abstract

The paper offers an overview of the Italian-language literary production by diasporic writers of Ethiopian origin, focusing in particular on Gabriella Ghermandi’s 2007 novel Regina di fiori e di perle (‘Queen of flowers and pearls’). This output will be contextualized within the field of Italian postcolonial and ‘migrant’ literature, which emerged in the 1990s but has yet to receive a proper recognition in Italian academic circles. The exploration of themes such as conflicting identities and multiple belongings is grounded, for Italophone postcolonial writers, in Italy’s inability to critically process its colonial past, and has therefore a prominent historical dimension. The paper will analyse in particular how Regina di fiori e di perle rewrites the historiography of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa, and how it engages with earlier literary representations of this history. Central to Ghermandi’s literary project is the attempt to create a historical identity able to preserve difference, and contrast forceful assimilationist attempts, but at the same time also able to accommodate similarities, and fight against an essentialization of that difference.

Citation

Marzagora, S. (2015). Re-writing history in the literature of the Ethiopian diaspora in Italy. African Identities, 13(3), 211-225. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2015.1074538

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 5, 2015
Online Publication Date Oct 23, 2015
Publication Date Nov 1, 2015
Deposit Date May 26, 2016
Journal African Identities
Print ISSN 1472-5843
Electronic ISSN 1472-5851
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 13
Issue 3
Pages 211-225
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2015.1074538
Keywords writers of Ethiopian origin, Ethiopian diaspora, Italian colonial historiography, Ethiopian history, Italian postcolonial literature, Gabriella Ghermandi, multiculturalism