Rethinking the Mother Tongue in Contemporary Italy

Italy has always been a multilingual country, a place of many mother tongues. United as a state in 1861, the government attempted to “make Italians” – i.e., to create cohesion amongst its very different communities – by implementing one national language. Antonio Gramsci, who was trained as a linguist, observed how these linguistic policies played a role of intimacy in creating political hegemony, while oppressing the subalterns. Discussing language, that is, he criticized Italy’s internal colonialism and the Fascist regime. Rethinking the Mother Tongue in Contemporary Italy: From Gramsci to Postcolonial Literature asks what Gramsci’s thoughts on language mean for the present. It zooms in on Gramsci’s notion of “immanent grammar” and reads it alongside contemporary Italian postcolonial literature. It also under lines how Italy’s national Language Question has been involved with territorial expansion and questions of gendered and racialized bodies. Taking Italy as a case study, this book argues against monolingual and ethno-linguistic notions of the mother tongue and proposes to rethink the mother tongue from an immanent perspective: As an open-ended relation between language, bodies and terra, as immanent grammar. It will be of interest to scholars in the fields of gender and postcolonial theory, new materialism, Italian studies, comparative literature, intellectual history, linguistics, philosophy of language and transnational humanities.