Black British and Black Italian: Antinomies of modernity, centrality of cultures and identity of margins (Examples in the narrative of Andrea Levy and Gabriella Ghermandi)

This paper offers a parallel between black British literature and the younger Italian literature of migration, which I'll call 'black Italian' to strenghten the affinities between the two. Starting from the field of British cultural studies, which first focused on processes of biological, linguistic and cultural hybridization and creolization in the West, at the origin of the new identities of the third millennium, I'll base my argumentation on the compared analysis of two novels: Small Island by the Anglo-Caribbean writer Andrea Levy and Regina di fiori e di perle, by the Italian-Ethiopian writer Gabriella Ghermandi. The parallel will show how narrations from the margins recover oral stories from apparently marginal countries and oppose them to the stories of imperial metropolitan hegemonic countries, becoming themselves increasingly 'central'.