Current Issue
This issue of Heteroglossia addresses the phenomena of modern migrations aiming at going beyond the perspectives that are usually taken when investigating them. One of the dimensions that until now has been studied, in the field of social sciences, above all to determine the most efficient strategies to obtain the so-called “integration” of migrants, has been the interaction among the different linguistic and cultural spheres, especially as regards education systems. Much less analyzed, in the areas of linguistic and literary studies and of communication sciences, have been the processes of production of the representations of migrant experiences on the two sides of the “borders” separating those who move from one space to the other and those who instead already inhabit the places where those “moving subjects” come to live. The investigation has mainly focused both on the stereotypes and prejudices that generate the image of the other as “invader” and on the strategies of self-representation of the members of migrant communities, and especially in this last field the linguistic (or better still multi- and plurilingual) dimension has been deemed fundamental.
This issue aims at going beyond such perspectives (even if it indispensably keeps them into account), with the ambition of promoting a more articulated vision of these processes of production of texts and images, and of identifying which systems of codified signification (that is, which “languages”) come into play when it comes to “talk about” the migrant experience (or make it “visible”).
Specifically, besides the languages of diasporas and the phenomema of bi/plurilingualism, the analysis focuses on the practices of intercultural translation and mediation; the rhetorics used by the languages of politics in Italy and in the other migrants’ “places of destination”; the typologies of discursive (linguistic and visual) forms spread by mass media in the Western/Northern world; the response of education systems to the coexistence (and friction) of different linguistic and cultural universes in the school environment and in other formal and non-formal learning contexts; the dimensions of “race,” gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability/disability, age, etc. (and their intersections) in discourses about migrations; the representation of the causes and consequences of migration flows in the countries the migrant subjects come from; the languages of literary, audiovisual or artistic encoding of the migrant experience; the interaction of different languages in literary and non-literary discourses about migrant experiences.
