Laura Pariani’s Novels of Migration: From Transnational Memory to Cosmopolitan Ethics

This article focuses on two novels by Laura Pariani: Quando Dio ballava il tango (2002) and Il piatto dell’angelo (2013), both of which recount tales of travel and migration between Italy and South America across a broad historical timeframe. These novels represent a challenge to narrow constructions of Italy as a monocultural and monolingual nation, foregrounding cultural and linguistic hybridity and highlighting patterns of belonging that do not map smoothly onto national borders. I argue that while the earlier novel explores the interconnectedness between Italy and Argentina, reconstructs Italy’s past as a nation of emigrants, and gives voice to the historically marginalized, the later novel uses the past more pointedly as a key to understanding the present. Il piatto dell’angelo’s juxtaposition of stories of Italian emigration from the early twentieth century with personal accounts of present-day migrants to Italy reminds Italians of their own emigratory past and aims to elicit empathy with their contemporary counterparts. In highlighting the economic exploitation of migrants in Italy, the novel explores the ethical dilemmas posed by globalization and raises pertinent questions about Italy’s and Europe’s response to the contemporary movement of people from the Global South to the Global North. Rather than viewing migrants as marginalized others, these novels place a cultural memory of migration and movement at the very center of their understandings of italianità.