Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives is about identity-individual and national-and belonging. Also, it is an affirmation of diversity. Its editors have brought together articles by scholars analyzing the literature of migration and creative pieces by recognized authors who have lived experience of migration.

English-speaking readers will find their own societies’ struggles with diversity mirrored in Italy’s colonial inheritance, its renewed nationalism, populism, xenophobia, shifting national identity, and other phenomena which are the contexts for the writings in this volume.

The artists and scholars presented and discussed in this volume often challenge national discourses and dehumanizations, issues of race and of gender. But many also seek to move beyond the negative and critical to claim belonging-especially national belonging-in the name of difference as part of human experience. The selections emphasize how individuals both reflect and enact societal change, and foreground the inescapable fact that diversity and migration drive and shape societal identity in our current world.