Sinergie della crisi: un’ipotesi sulla letteratura comparata e il pensiero postcoloniale

Between the turn of the nineteenth century and the onset of a new generation of comparative scholars after WWII Italian comparative literature faced a crisis caused by Croce's rejection of the principles on which the discipline is based. This contribution scrutinizes how comparative literature has evolved ever since, reorienting its theoretical frame in the 1970s and 1980s, thanks to the influence of human geography first and postcolonial studies later. Already in the 1960s Dionisotti and anthropologists such as De Martino and Cirese paved the way to a scientific approach to regional realities, in which issues of ethnicity, oral and vernacular expressions so far confined to subaltern spheres started to be systematically studied along the lines of Gramscian theorization. In the early 1990s Italy, previously an emigrant nation, became a destination for new forms of global migration. The scant attention paid to the colonial past adds to the new manifestations of the Southern Question - North-South inequalities and a fragile sense of national identity - in shaping new hybridized literary forms which distinguish the Italian postcolonial literature.