Selling/Storytelling: African Autobiographies in Italy by Cristina Lombardi-Diop (The American University of Rome) Italian Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Legacies, Jacqui Andall and Derek Duncan (eds.), Palgrave Publisher (forthcoming) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Work in progress: Do not cite without author’s permission As a way to probe the weight and relevance of literary texts written in Italian by African migrants on the larger socio-economic context of African migrations to Italy, more than just focusing on a literary analysis, the following essay aims at placing the process of their production within the context of African migratory social and economic practices and the Italian cultural market. To begin such an investigation, one should inevitably interrogate some of the most common assumptions that postcolonial literary analysis has contributed to affirm and, primarily, the question of the boundaries to literariness that the postcolonial text is often believed to challenge and disrupt. It is generally assumed that all postcolonial/migrant texts are radically subversive, and that the source of their subversiveness is to be found in their hybridity and heterogeneity 1 . As Leela Ghandi argues, “it is in the attempt to make the ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘migrant’ writer authentically representative of the ‘third world’ that postcolonial literary theory becomes dangerously prescriptive,” 2 to the point where “the obligatory subversiveness of postcolonial literature is seriously limited by the notion of ‘textual politics’ favored by postcolonial literary theory” (Ghandi, 156). My analysis today will take the case of Senegalese Pap Khouma’ s Io, venditore di elefanti (1990), 3 in order to show how editorial and marketing choices, that have determinant impact upon possibly subversive textual politics, may also indeed result in the denial of authorial agency and therefore pose a serious limitation to actual social politics. In order to offer what, at this point, are only partial answers to this complex issue, in the first part of the essay I will focus on the very process of production of the text; I will then turn to forms of economic and social exchange that, for African immigrants in Italy, do take place outside the text. By doing