The challenge of otherness: an imagological reading of Younis Tawfik's La straniera

Abstract

This article offers a critical reading of Younis Tawfik's novel La straniera from the perspective of imagology. This approach to comparative literature focuses on representations of foreigners and otherness in literary texts. Tawfik constructs a love story whose protagonists are two Arab migrants living in Italy: Amina and the Architetto. He has integrated perfectly into Italian society, while she suffers a series of vicissitudes that force her into prostitution. The characters constantly live between two cultural realities (their country of origin and their host country) that condition their cultural practices and the way they relate to the world. The novel focuses on the idea of foreignness and the search for identity that migrants face in their host country. Based on these premises, an analysis articulated with the imagological method proposed by Daniel-Henri Pageaux (1994) will be conducted. The critical reading of the novel is constructed on the basis of the study of three elements: the lexical-semiotic configurations of the story, its narrative structures, and the text-author-context relationship. This critical approach seeks to delve into the representation of otherness in an iconic text of migration literature in Italy. This literary phenomenon illustrates the great cultural transformations that Italy is undergoing: a nation facing the challenge of multiculturalism.