Italia/Argentina. Una storia condivisa. Il racconto / Una historia compartida. El relato

This book aims to trace the ideological configurations of the literary imaginary on the Italian / Argentine emigration of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, through texts of various kinds, in particular novels - written and published in both countries -, as a reflection of the different political and ideological attitudes that have accompanied the phenomenon over time. In the history of migrations, the 'Argentine case', as stated by Vanni Blengino (2003), is still exemplary today for a series of reasons, among which the continuity of the emigration process which begins with the United Italy and develops until to the years following the Second World War, another important reason lies to the extent of the phenomenon that involves, as never happened in any other country, the entire regional span. This factor refers to the complexity of the event - a dream and at the same time a nightmare in the face of the harsh reality of America - which, in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century, first affected the regions of the north and then extended to those of the south. Italian emigration to Argentina has been a phenomenon that has now ended, but its consequences, as Braudel would say, are long-lasting, they produce signals of a social and cultural nature still in the present. In addition to the socio-historical point of view, Italian culture has inserted itself, conditioning its development, in all the ganglia of the life of Argentina, starting from music (Héctor Piazzolla, Manlio Francia, Mario Battistella and the bands, for example), as Annibale Cetrangolo (2018) tells us, to the kitchen (Los sorrentinos by Virginia Higa), without neglecting the arts in general and, specially, literature. In the latter case, the study of events related to the social imaginary is interesting, clearly visible both in the late nineteenth-century texts and in the contemporary ones, published mostly in Argentina, in a sort of rhetorical continuity and, to a lesser extent, in Italy too. The authors of the research - developed in Diaspore, volume no.19, written in Italian and Castilian - are two scholars from the geographic areas analyzed, both university professors, experts on the subject. This book is the result of frequent travels and study exchanges, made over long years of friendship and intellectual complicity that have fueled mostly coincident visions even if there is no lack of different points of view. This testifies once again the variety of approaches to the migration process, considered on both sides of the ocean, without detracting from the richness of human and collective experiences, from the paths of integration and shared values, in the belief that only the meeting with the Other can give everyone his own identity and generate a real experience.