Taking Italy’s linguistic landscape as an example of how a national language is multiple in and of itself, Rethinking the Mother Tongue in Contemporary Italy: From Gramsci to Postcolonial Literature offers an innovative postcolonial, non-monolingual approach to the notion of the mother tongue.

After Italy’s unification in 1861, the government tried to linguistically turn the culturally varying inhabitants into one people, seemingly trying to create a national mother tongue. However, it was only in the twentieth century, when mass media entered the family sphere, that Italians started to speak Italian as a mother tongue. Departing from the understanding that the notion of the mother tongue caught in monolingual thinking, the book analyses its relation to gender, race and its territorial colonial expansion. At present, according to the ius sanguinis (law of blood) Italianness is still based on blood, not on mother tongue.

By combining Gramsci’s notion of immanent grammar, contemporary Italian postcolonial literature, and new materialism, this book offers an innovative postcolonial and new materialist analysis of the notion of the mother tongue. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of intellectual history, Italian studies, postcolonial theory and postcolonial and comparative literature as well as transnational humanities.