Melancholia of Migration in the Transnational Italian Imaginary

Proposing “migrant melancholia” as a theoretical framework that connects migration, memory, and melancholia, this chapter examines experimentation in La linea del colore (The Color Line, 2020), a novel by Italian writer of Somali origin Igiaba Scego; Asmat (2015), a short film by Ethiopian filmmaker Dagmawi Yimer; and Antigone Power (2018), a theatrical adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, a Brussels-based Somali Italian writer and performer. The chapter takes a transnational approach to migration and melancholia, focusing on the diasporic dimension of the circulation of people, languages, and artifacts across the Mediterranean. It considers the present discourses on migration from North Africa to the southern European shores as being necessarily interconnected to their colonial and postcolonial histories. Against previous theoretical accounts of melancholia that see it as a pathological response to loss, this chapter analyzes migrant melancholia as an affect with creative potential, as an imaginative space in which forms of individual and collective life can be reconfigured. The “trans” in “transnational” designates here both the mandatory crossing point for those forced to leave their countries and a site generative of political possibilities that transcend the color lines of “races” and nation-states.