Arabising Italian? Transnational literature as multilingual transaction

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Abstract

This article investigates what kind of multilingual operations are carried out as migrant and transnational creative writers deploy in their fictions in Italian (often an acquired language) the languages which they hold in their personal repertoires. Exploring first the linguistic, political and cultural implications of what Algerian author, Amara Lakhous, describes as ‘Arabising Italian’, or of reformulating any one standard language by means of another, the discussion proceeds to examine a selection of linguistic strategies deployed by migrant and second-generation writers, which work to expose the creative possibilities of linguistic leakage across any rigid borders drawn around ‘national’ languages and standard forms. Analysis of these forms of translanguaging highlights the linguistic and cultural processes by which subnational, national and transnational forms of Italian may be combined in order both to engage readers in the active creative practice of multilingual social interaction and to challenge the hegemony of standard language and of ‘national’ cultures and literatures. The article demonstrates how transnational narratives counter the ‘monolingual paradigm’ (Yildiz 2012) and how, through drawing attention to and practising non-normative uses of the standard language, multilingual creative writing functions as a privileged site of linguistic, cultural – and so, political – transaction.

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