ABSTRACT
This essay offers a reading of the work of two Italian-Somali writers, Cristina Ubax Ali Farah and Igiaba Scego, whose narrations weave the vicissitudes of the Somali diaspora, the trails of Italian colonial occupation of Somalia, and the condition of migrancy in today’s Italy and Europe. The texts often go back and forth from contemporary everyday life to the past by means of digressions and memoir, and they become crossroads where the forgotten Italian colonial past meets contemporary transnational migrations, thus showing how second generations reshape colonial memories in the migration context of the former colonizing country. These postcolonial textures have hardly entered the field of Italian literature and literary criticism and, broadly speaking, of Italian studies in Italy.
