Search results for "African migration to Europe"

Salah Methnani’s Immigrato: Portrait of a Migrant as a Young Man

2012

Although after Unification Italy was predominantly a country of emigration, in recent years it has become a hub for migrants from different parts of the world. Among these migrants a group of writers has contributed to re-configuring Italy's national literary identity. Read by critics primarily as an autobiographical text with remarkable sociological value, Tunisian-born Salah Methnani’s Immigrato is, I argue, first and foremost a classic Bildungsroman. Salah, the 'immigrant' in the title, is the story's protagonist, point of view and leading metaphor. His Bildung follows a double path. On the one hand Italy is a country imagined through TV and books read in school, on the other it is the c…