Introduction: Critical issues in Transnational Italian Studies

Almost a decade ago, scholar of Italian literature Emma Bond authored the article that anticipated (with its title as well as its argument) the so-called “trans-national turn” in Italian studies (Bond, 2014). That turn has since taken many shapes: large research projects, book series, journal issues, conference panels, symposia, working groups, undergraduate and graduate courses, departmental name changes, tenure track jobs and lectureships. The success of Transnational Italian Studies in the UK and the USA (and to a much lesser extent in Italy) has to do with its ability to multiply the vantage points from which we may look at Italy and at Italian culture as objects of inquiry, thereby demanding that we also ask increasingly theoretical questions about what a nation and its culture really are, how they come into being, how they are perceived and represented. A transnational approach to Italian Studies asks us to take into account the violent histories of nationalism, colonialism, emigration, and migration that continue to inform national identity formation, as well as the (thus far) marginal characters in the disciplinary stories we tell, who nonetheless stand at the very center of that process. The increasing popularity of the term “transnational” within Italian Studies, however, also points towards possible risks, such as the potential for the label (now mostly spelled without Bond’s hyphen) to be used in increasingly paradigmatic ways, creating homogenizing effects or promoting a new orthodoxy, while only gesturing towards surface changes rather than encouraging deeper transformation. This special issue of Forum Italicum investigates the changes brought about by the “transnational turn” in Italian Studies as well as their effects by taking stock of developments in the field and, at