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Parati, Graziella. Migration Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. 272 pp. £35.00/$55.00. ISBN 0–8020–3924–3, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 44, Issue 1, January 2008, Page 96, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm149
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In our contemporary diasporic Italy, Europe and world, identity has become a much-studied issue. Whether linguistic, religious or ideological, identity is a strong marker of provenance. Migration is an up-to-date topic of discussion, and Graziella Parati's Migration Italy studies this issue from an authoritative, scholarly point of view. While in the past Italy had always been considered as a “source” country of immigration, Migration Italy studies Italy as a country that in the last twenty years has attracted migration from “poor and war-torn countries around the world seeking a better life in a stable environment” (inside front cover). The migration phenomenon has transformed Italian culture into a multicultural one, and this volume spans cultural phenomena that reflect these changes: both immigrant literature, to which Parati rhetorically refers as “minor literature”, and migration as recounted by contemporary cinema. Both immigrant literature and cinema adopt a polemical “talking back” strategy as a reaction to laws and customs that try to suffocate migrants as “children of a lesser god” who must conform to a background culture and language that are less homogeneous than that background culture would have others believe. Migration Italy is a ground-breaking study that enables the reader to understand modern, contemporary Italian society, in its complexities and in its new, developing, multi-coloured, hybrid, cultural identity. This well-written and well-researched work is completed by a rich Bibliography and a well-thought-out Analytical Index.
