“Second Generations” and Identity in Andrea Cotti’s Luca Wu Series: An Opportunity for a Fruitful Intercultural and Transnational Dialogue in Italian Crime Fiction

This article aims to rethink Italian crime fiction by repositioning it in relation to intercultural and transnational processes of the production and consumption of cultural artefacts. More specifically, it focuses on how writers can use the crime genre as a powerful device to engage with current political debates about multiculturalism, minority rights and identity from an intercultural and transnational perspective. To this end, this article will discuss the representation of migration in Italian crime fiction over the last thirty years, and will then narrow down to the current Sino-Italian literary discourse. In particular, it focuses on Andrea Cotti’s crime novels Il cinese (2018) and L’impero di mezzo (2021), and the author’s attempt to provide a counter-narrative to a public Sino-Italian discourse in which cultural differences and distance have been essentially used to legitimise Italian superiority and justify the increasingly prevalent feeling of anxiety and paranoia towards the other in the Italian context. Drawing on intercultural hermeneutics and transnational studies, I argue that the author systematically keeps the narrative focus on first- and second-generation Sino-Italian characters, and uses comic relief and the intercultural as positive triggers. By doing so, this study argues, Cotti predominantly uses cultural differences in an attempt to put the emphasis on cultural exchange and reciprocal knowledge as the starting point for a fruitful and balanced intercultural dialogue. As a result, Cotti’s texts offer opportunities for creating new modes of agency, new strategies of recognition, and new forms of political and symbolic representation of the intercultural subject. It is also argued that valuable insights into literary objects and phenomena can be gained through a detailed analysis of the impact of intercultural elements on the reading process of Cotti’s crime novels. Through investigating, rhetorically, these elements’ ability to challenge the common Sino-Italian discourse and potentially change readers’ beliefs and attitudes in the real world, it is argued that these texts provide readers with an opportunity to develop an intercultural mind, which enables them to produce a more complex and thoughtful reflection and dialogue on the notion of Italianness and on issues such as structural violence, citizenship, identity, integration and in-between positions, as well as, more generally, the important role that cultural artefacts can play in intercultural and immigration public debates.