The migrant and the shaman: transcultural agents in two contemporary italian novels

Abstract

The aim of this work is to focus attention on the transcultural role played by female migrant workers in contemporary Italy, seen as a diasporic space, in the novels Apri le porte all'alba (1999), by Elena Gianini Belotti, and L'indecenza (2008), by Elvira Seminara. These social characters - participants in intercultural and interbodily exchanges - have become literary characters, and even though they are reduced to non-people or marked by a supposed essentialist ethnic center, they stimulate the differential and transgressive forces of a globalized cultural homogeneity, as stated by Hall (2003). In an attempt to highlight this role of the migrant, I make use of the shaman figure in the magic existential drama and in the crisis of presence, discussed by Ernesto de Martino, one of the founders of the Italian anthropology, in Il mondo magico (1948).

Migrant; Shaman; Contemporary Italian Literature