Literature of the Somali Diaspora

The first study of Anglophone and Italian novels by Somali diasporic authors, offering a new critical framework for multilingual and transnational analysis of Somali literature.

Building on the latest scholarship about multilingual contexts, diaspora studies and the rapidly expanding field of Italian postcolonial studies, Marco Medugno examines Somali diasporic literature with a comparative perspective. Considering works written in English and Italian, he argues that Somali diasporic authors share similar themes and aesthetics, thus creating an interliterary community within the diaspora space.

By using multilingualism as a starting point, Medugno provides significant insights into how Somali national and individual identities are constructed in diasporic, global contexts through geography, style, form, language and the re-writing of national histories emerging out of colonization and independence. Analysing acclaimed Somali novels such as Nuruddin Farah's Links and Crossbones, Igiaba Scego's Adua and Cristina Ali Farah's Little Mother, he questions any definition of 'local' as 'provincial', instead considering it a site for interrogating global concerns.

Literature of the Somali Diaspora is organized around three themes: spatiality, language and resistance help to contextualize authors, forced by the decades-long Somali Civil War, to write outside Somalia and in different languages - including Somali, Italian, English, German, Dutch and Arabic - within global literary circuits. Their work thus creates a literature not confined within national borders but an interliterary global community, a transnational and multilingual space in which they share world aesthetic ideologies, challenge and engage with literary traditions in different languages and show an interplay between diverse cultures.

Auteur

Marco Medugno is Associate Lecturer at Newcastle University, UK, and previously taught at the University of Glasgow. His area of research includes Anglophone and Italian Postcolonial Studies, Comparative and World Literature, Diaspora Studies, Anglophone African Literature, and Afropean/Black Italian Literature. His articles appeared in From the European South, Italian Studies in Southern Africa and Il Tolomeo. He collaborated on the special issue of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde celebrating Nuruddin Farah's 50-year-long career. He has also worked on Dante and the adaptations of the Comedy, authoring a chapter in A South African Convivio with Dante (2021) and the article for Tydskrif vir Letterkunde (2020).