Dalla resistenza anticoloniale alla condizione postcoloniale. La Sardegna di Sergio Atzeni

This article explores the movement from anti-colonial to post-colonial frameworks in the social and literary discourses elaborated by Sardinian intellectuals from the 1960s to the 1990s. It uses as its study case the work of Sergio Atzeni, writer in Italian and Italian translator of the Martinique writer Patrick Chamoiseau. It analyses the literary images through which Sardinians as an ethnic group are portrayed in Atzeni's fiction, and it compares his portrayal with those elaborated by politicians and intellectuals of the previous generation. Finally, it compares the passage from anti-colonialism to post-colonialism in Sardinia with the one traceable in the island of Martinique, thus advocating for a postcolonial reading of Sardinian writers in Italian language at the end of the 20th century. In doing so, though, the author stresses the importance of studying the peculiarities of the development of a postcolonial thinking 'internal' to the Italian social and cultural history in the second half of the 20th century. This is informed mostly by the early Italian reception of Antonio Gramsci's work, which will be later highly influential, internationally, for many postcolonial thinkers (from Said, to Spivak and Bhabha).