Divorce and dialogue: intertextuality in Amara Lakhous' Divorzio all'islamica a viale Marconi

This study addresses the underdeveloped dialogue in contemporary intercultural relations between Italy and its ‘others’ to examine the ways in which Amara Lakhous' novel Divorzio all'islamica a viale Marconi (2010) [Divorce Islamic style in viale Marconi] articulates a postcolonial response to Pietro Germi's 1961 film Divorzio all'italiana [Divorce Italian style] by initiating an intercultural dialogue among preexistent and emerging cultures. Foregrounding intertextuality and ‘writing back’ in a postcolonial context as intercultural communication modes, this paper explores the intertextual relations between the novel and the film; it examines the use of irony and multivocal narrative in Lakhous' novel as strategies of intercultural mediation. Moreover, it interrogates the works' social, cultural, historical and linguistic movements to analyse the narrativizations of familiarity and estrangement. Divorzio all'islamica a viale Marconi enables a dialogue between local cultures and ‘guest’ cultures by tracing (obliterated) common histories, shared experiences and similar social and cultural predicaments across the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, remapping geographical and cultural terrains