Many Diasporas from One Transnational Italy

ended

TransIT is inspired by the necessity of promoting a more open and complex perception of Italian culture in the context of higher education. It aims to broaden the conception of Italianness by investigating a series of cultural texts that can be included within a comprehensive definition of ‘Italian culture’, once this is extended to its migratory and diasporic manifestations. Since Italy’s unification, migration has affected a significant part of the population, who started leaving the country in search of better living conditions. Excluding from the study of Italian culture texts produced in the context of Italian migrations, whether written in Italian or not, thus implies the exclusion of a significant part of this culture. On these premises, TransIT draws upon multidisciplinary resources – literature, film, television, newspapers and magazines, sociological surveys and historical documents – and adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examining the evolution of Italian culture outside of Italy, with a specific focus on the experiences included within the Italophone and Anglophone worlds. In looking at race- and gender-specific cultural witnesses, it seeks to redress the mainstream interpretation of Italian culture. Engaging with universities in the United Kingdom and the United States, the project responds to the demand for revised and updated methods and materials for teaching Italian culture in transnational perspective. TransIT offers a novel set of teaching resources, moving beyond the conventional textbook and promoting an innovative and multi-layered methodology which encourages a dynamic approach to textual analysis. An interactive, bilingual online multimedia anthology of creative texts constitutes its principal outcome. Its bilingual nature makes much of this material available for the first time to those who can only read Italian or English.