The current state of the Italian linguistic panorama has been modified by the presence, on the national territory, of immigrants. While the Ten Theses (1975), “one of the first modern documents of bottom-up language policy in Italy,” promulgated by the GISCEL (Gruppo di Intervento e Studio nel Campo dell’Educazione Linguistica) democratized language education by contrasting the monolingual pedagogical paradigm with minority languages and regional varieties of standard Italian, it was only at the turn of the 21^st century that migrant communities started to be taken into consideration (Carbonara and Scibetta 1050). With “neoplurilingualism” (Villarini and Vedovelli) linguists described the phenomenon according to which languages of new immigrants intertwine with Italian. Scholarly production that investigates new paradigms of translanguaging pedagogy that emphasizes the heritage language of children has gained considerable attention (Carbonara and Scibetta 1051).

From the end of the 1980s, the arrival of Italian literature written by migrants has resulted in the emergence of new linguistic influences in Italian texts, a widely observed phenomenon (Contarini; Groppaldi; Ricci). Nonetheless, multilingualism in Italian postcolonial fiction written for a child readership has been largely ignored by scholars in the field, consistent with its customary marginalization in academic teaching and research. In the first study of this corpus, published in 2010 by Lorenzo Luatti, it is acknowledged that in 1990, Sinnos, a Roman publishing house for children, was founded in the Rebibbia prison by a group of volunteers and foreign convicts. The first result of this project is the historical series of bilingual books, “I Mappamondi” (Mappamundi), curated by Vinicio Ongini, and introduced by Tullio De Mauro, who is considered the father of the already mentioned Ten Theses. Intentionally created to broaden the publishing landscape to migrants in Italy, it was a first attempt at educating children with regards to the new (at that time) multiculturalism in Italian schools. These books were pioneering in those years in which Italy’s social fabric was starting to change; already in 1998, recognizing the importance of Sinnos, Sandra Ponzanesi wrote that it “attempts to introduce Italian children to the idea of a multicultural Italy by presenting them with the life stories and the languages of immigrants in Italy” (106).

After “I Mappamondi,” Sinnos introduced “Zefiro” (Zephyr), a bilingual series for 13-year-old children, and “Fiabilandia” (Storyland), a collection of picturebooks, mostly bilingual. Sinnos has provided a space for the languages of migrants and refugees, and for the languages of former European and Italian colonies (such as Somali). Bilingualism in these books is not only the decision to display two languages, but that of reflecting on the power relations between them, openly opting for a multilingual education. In general, books of this corpus appear hybridized through different languages: Spanish, Somali, Arabic, and more.

Despite being born in the literary “outskirts,” Italian postcolonial literature for children is now sold by major publishers, such as Mondadori and Rizzoli, and it is detached from the multicultural sector (Finozzi 20–21). This means that this literature has diversified its themes and topics beyond the previously preponderant focus on migration and integration. Even though bilingual books, because of their being tied to the multicultural sector, have decreased in number, most of the books published today display multilingualism and metaliterary reflections on the use of one or more languages. As I will outline in the next section, while most of the books have lexical borrowings from other languages, other types of multilingualism are also present, such as “non-Italian” names.

In this section, I explore three books in which adult women perform naming practices against mispronunciation of their names. In the picturebook Questa non è una babysitter written by Gabriella Kuruvilla and illustrated by Gabriella Giandelli, the child protagonist Mattia is the son of a white man and a nonwhite woman. The book deals with the uneasiness felt by Mattia when having to tell his friends that the Black woman outside the school is his mother. Mattia pretends that she is his babysitter. One day, a friend of Mattia asks the mother her name:

As we have seen here, the child attempts to pronounce the name but gets it wrong. The mother repeats the name and explains its Indian origin, emphasizing the importance of correct pronunciation and understanding its roots. This insistence promotes the necessary effort to learn the name accurately, rather than perpetuating mispronunciation. Additionally, the name is directly connected to phenotypical differences, such as skin color, as depicted in the illustrations: the mother is darker than the son, who is darker than his classmates. In this context, language serves as a marker of alterity or “otherness.” Ginko and Salvatore, friends of Mattia, are from China and Southern Italy, respectively, and both speak “una lingua strana” (a strange language). Just as skin color can lead to exclusion by the dominant group, so can the use of different languages or speech patterns, even when the individual, such as Salvatore, does not have a different skin color. This book thus portrays a multilingual environment without necessarily using multilingual lexicon or syntax. Naming practices in postcolonial children’s literature introduce “foreign words,” exposing readers to a multilingual setting which per se invokes children’s cultural identities and educate them in shaping a more equal society (Alberton Gunn et al.).

The shame felt by the son stems from the fact that his mother Ashima is a nonwhite woman. In Italy, the association of Black women with the role of domestic worker remains strong; since the 1980s, domestic work in Italy has increasingly been performed by immigrant women (see Colombo). This trend has reinforced a racialized stereotype: immigrant women in Italy are often confined to roles such as housekeepers, caregivers, or servants. Fiore, analyzing Questa non è una babysitter, notes that “a dark-skinned woman is categorized as a babysitter before being conceptualized as a mother” (135). Thus, Ashima exists at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression: gender, race, and class. Her resistance against mispronunciation can be read as a form of rebellion against this stereotype; the immediate association between nonwhite women and domestic workers prevents the recognition of diverse stories, people, and experiences. As I will show in the next section, Blackness remains a constant homogenizing factor.

Something similar happens in La tata marrone by Edwige Guiebre. In this short autobiographical novel, the narrator Edwige describes her work as a kindergarten teacher, denouncing that

In this case Edwige is never called by her name: identity is solely linked to the color of her skin through metaphor, analogy to food (chocolate), and to stereotypes (African). Even though “nanny Edwige” still entails a problematic reference to her role, language awareness is raised through reflections on naming and renaming. This example can be connected to the previous one: both Ashima and Edwige use their names to fight misrepresentation and homogenization.

Another example of a naming practice is to be found in Come due farfalle in volo sulla Grande Muraglia by Yang Xiaping, a bilingual children’s novel in Mandarin and Italian. Bilingual picturebooks that feature indigenous languages, languages spoken by immigrant communities, or languages from countries with more than one official language, display both the dominant and the minority language, treating them as equals without assigning greater prestige to either one (Hadaway and Young). Although Chinese Italian literature is still understudied compared to that produced by other migrant communities, it has recently established itself in the academic field (e.g., Pedone; Zhang; C. Giuliani) and in the book market, where there have already been cases of editorial success, such as that of Bamboo Hirst’s books.

The protagonist of Come due farfalle is Jasmine, a third-generation Chinese Italian woman. In the first half of the volume, she consistently asks her husband Dalin, a Chinese man who has migrated to Italy, to call her Jasmine and not Lili, which is the name she was given when born. She explains that she decided to be called Jasmine when she was 8 years old. After having travelled to Beijing, Jasmine starts to appreciate her ancestors’ culture more, and eventually, she asks Dalin to call her Lili:

The case of Jasmine-Lili does not only reflect the renaming phenomenon, but it can also be considered a form of self-renaming. As pointed out previously, assigning a domesticized name to a migrant child is “motivated by dominant discourses which frame immigrants and differences in terms of deficits” (Souto-Manning 112). The same process can be said to happen when the person, imbued in a social framework where their name is considered somehow less prestigious, opts for another, “domesticized” name. Nitti’s survey, which I mentioned in the introduction to this article, reveals that most of the names of L2 speakers in Italy that undergo a radical substitution in favor of Italian names are Chinese (908). Moreover, most often it is the persons themselves, or the family, in the case of children at school (Cacia and Papa 480), that initiate the renaming process and choose an Italian name. When it comes to Jasmine-Lili, it is worth noticing that Jasmine is also a foreign name, etymologically Arabic, but being one of the most popular names in the United States and Italy (Caffarelli), it has a higher degree of linguistic prestige in Italy (Nitti).

Multilingual literature often includes metalinguistic reflections. Jasmine-Lili’s decision to reclaim her Chinese name represents an act of defiance against cultural assimilation and a means of reconnecting with her Chinese heritage. In the book, the young couple extensively discusses language issues from a transgenerational perspective: from the struggles faced by Lili’s grandparents after migrating to Italy at the end of World War II to the isolation experienced by Lili’s Chinese classmates who lacked proficiency in Italian. To this regard, Ala-Risku writes that this procedure, which she defines as “metalanguage,” is used specifically by “Writers [who] […] are not linguists, but they work with the language, they work the language and use it to describe society and people through their own way of expressing themselves” (216, emphasis in the original). Postcolonial writers, like Xiaping, effectively highlight the isolation and stereotypes stemming from the absence of a shared language.

The final two examples illustrate how child or young adult characters claim their own names. These naming practices, because they are performed in defiance of adults, convey a stronger message than the previous examples. Indeed, as I will demonstrate, these characters use naming practices to challenge both adult authority and broader Italian societal norms.

In the autobiographical YA novel Allergica al pesce: Hakuna matata by Ndeye Fatou Faye, there is another case of mispronunciation. The protagonist, Ndeye Fatou Faye, a girl from Veneto with Senegalese origins, denounces the tendency of Italians to change the order of the two parts of her name:

Allergica al pesce presents an extremely sophisticated linguistic texture as it mixes standard Italian with mostly Venetian dialect and Wolof. In the novel, Ndeye Fatou Faye travels to Senegal to reconnect with her roots since part of her family still lives there; the geographical movements across the country also function as a linguistic journey towards her own identity. She constantly shows a certain disappointment towards the fact that wherever she is, she is perceived as a foreigner, in Senegal for having an Italian accent when speaking Wolof, in Italy for being Italian but Black: “Ma esiste un posto al mondo dove nessuno mai si sconvolge se comincio a parlare?” (But is there a place in the world where no one is shocked if I start talking?). Her Blackness, as well as Ashima’s and Edwige’s, is a mark of alterity in Italy, stereotyped and criminalized through media discourses (G. Giuliani).

The migrant’s body looked at through the Western gaze is often anonymized and exploited, belonging to those who look at it and circumscribe it, for its Blackness, in a homogeneous space without geographical or historical specification, as if it was a nameless body. An example of this is, according to Duncan, the recovery of the names of migrants drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. This act reclaims their identities by using proper names in opposition to the “spectacularization of the abject African body familiar from standard media representations” (Duncan 81). Listing the names of those bodies is “a potent strategy for countering the anonymity of numbers” (81): precisely that a-nonymity, that “being without name,” that renders Black bodies unrecognizable. While naming practices have been used to commemorate and retrieve people from silence, they also function as forms of resistance against the domestication and stereotypization of immigrants, Black people, and other minorities. To demand the right pronunciation of names is a way to recognize individuality within a discriminated group or community imposed by the dominant culture to the minorities’ one.

My last example is an autobiographical graphic novel for children, Il mio migliore amico è fascista by Takoua Ben Mohamed. The narration follows the adventures of the young Takoua, an Italian Tunisian girl. Takoua recalls having been named “Ben” by teachers, who did not make any effort to pronounce her full name in the right order, enumerating only one of the three parts, the one that is easier to pronounce: “è come se un Mario De Rossi venisse chiamato solo ‘De’… vi sembra normale?” (it is as if a Mario De Rossi were only called “De”… does it seem normal to you?; Ben Mohamed 69). Renaming is then both the refusal of Takoua’s name, underlining its inadequacy, and the bestowal of a name (in this case, only a part of the original one) that is an “Italianized” name.

Later in the book, she accuses her teacher of not truly knowing her and of only treating her based on prejudices: that she is obligated to wear a veil, that she is lazy, and that she is only seen as “la straniera” (the foreigner). When one of the teachers asks her what they could do to help her feel understood, Takoua responds:

Furthermore, she is frequently subjected to derogatory labels such as “terrorista” (terrorist) and “talebana” (Taliban).

Horn has titled a study on the topic with a sentence from Geneviève Makaping’s book Traiettorie di sguardi: E se gli altri foste voi? (Reversing the Gaze: What If the Other Were You?) from 2001: “voglio dire io come mi chiamo […] non devi dirmi tu” (I want to say myself what my name is, you shouldn’t tell me; Makaping 53–54). Horn observes how phenomena of stereotyping and stigmatizing migrants by the use of offensive expressions such as “vu cumprà” (a mocking imitation of the immigrants’ speech, which literally means “wanna buy?”) and “marocchino” (literally meaning “Moroccan,” but commonly used to address Black people in Italy) are frequently found in literature written by migrants.⁷

Just as Takoua insists on being called by her name, she also bravely defends her choice to wear the hijab. This decision leads her to endure instances of bullying from both her classmates and her teacher. By defending her name and resisting assimilation, she shows her determination to shape her identity as a Muslim Italian Tunisian girl. Illustrative of this quest for self-definition is the comparison between two words, “migrante” (migrant) and “bambina” (child):

In this sentence, the emphasis is placed on the words “MIGRANTE” and “BAMBINA,” which are contraposed: Takoua does not want to be “the migrant,” she just wants to be a little girl like all the others, without bearing the weight of her family’s journey. However, as signaled by the adversative “ma” (but), she was born in another land, so she realizes that she is a girl and a migrant all together. This brings to the table a double form of oppression; in fact, both the migrant and the child are stereotypically infantilized, needing to be guided. By the end of the volume, Takoua’s self-awareness matures into political engagement as she starts participating in students’ manifestations. Eventually, she describes her identity:

As Leyla Savsar has highlighted, when young characters represented in children’s books are children of a diaspora and, therefore, “navigate the transnational spaces of biculturalism,” their “representations […] can act as counter-hegemonic subjects” (396). Italy is a “society that has historically constructed itself as white and Catholic” (Romeo, “Introduction” 4); the story of Takoua and the defense of her name and her identity expose readers to feelings of resistance to a monolingual yet also monocultural homogenization.

In this article, I have discussed examples of naming practices. The analyses have demonstrated that characters use naming practices to counter mispronunciation, reclaiming the correct pronunciation of their names. In this way, they make these names enter a language, Italian, thus disrupting the linguistic homogeneity of the texts. Moreover, the analyses have shown that these names are not neutral; rather, they are entangled with racial, gender, and class discrimination in these books. The names of Ashima, Edwige and Faye are directly connected to their Blackness and, thus, associated with a social group, Black Italians, that still struggle, often also juridically, to be recognized in society. Recognition is also asked by other nonwhite subjects, such as Lili and Takoua. While the former reclaims her own Chinese given name, the latter revendicates her name in connection to her choice to be Muslim.

As I have shown, naming practices in Italian children’s literature can have a positive impact for at least two reasons. First, they disrupt the monolingual paradigm by representing a multilingual social texture; this can reflect the complexity of Italian people with migrant background, praising identity, heritage, and heterogeneity, empowering child characters to take action and to defend their own origins through language and names. Second, they fight racism and other forms of social oppression, such a class, religion, and gender. As for Italian Blackness, not only is literature written by Black authors one of the “key components in pro-Black pedagogy” (Muller et al. 48), postcolonial children’s fiction is also part of a bigger picture able to capture contemporary Italy, where “Black spaces also involved anti-Afrophobia, working against damaging mis-representations and situated ignorance” (Merrill 173).

From this perspective, names epitomize identities and naming practices counteract anonymity, domestication, and stereotypization. Research in this direction should be continued, especially in the fields of intercultural pedagogy and sociolinguistics, in order to place postcolonial children’s literature among the pedagogical tools to enhance an understanding of language power dynamics. If it is true, as Ponzanesi wrote, that at the beginning of the 1990s the future was “left open” as a “space for children who should grow up accustomed to diversity” (106), I believe that children’s literature written by migrants is still a great source for this purpose.