Literature of the Somali Diaspora

<p><b>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.</b><br><br>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.<br><br> 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 <i>Links</i> and <i>Crossbones</i>, Igiaba Scego’s <i>Adua</i> and Cristina Ali Farah’s <i>Little Mother</i>, he questions any definition of ‘local’ as ‘provincial’, instead considering it a site for interrogating global concerns. <br><br><i>Literature of the Somali Diaspora</i> 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.</p>