Negotiation of Meaning in Post-Migrant Narratives: African-Italian Perspectives

This paper examines the concept of negotiation of meaning as a literary strategy adopted by authors often classifiedas “migrants,” with particular reference to three works:
In fuga dalle tenebre
by Jean-Paul Pougala,
Il mio viaggiodella speranza dal Senegal all’Italia in cerca di fortuna
by Bay Mademba, and
Ama il tuo sogno. Vita e rivolta nellaterra dell’oro rosso
by Yvan Sagnet. The first part of the article introduces the concept of negotiation of meaning, aterm borrowed from interactional linguistics and conversation analysis, in order to explore its potential applicationsin the literary domain.
The analysis highlights how negotiation of meaning, understood as a process of explicative “transactions,” becomesa textual practice through which authors clarify, redefine, or contest cultural categories. In Pougala’s andMademba’s narratives, terms such as
fratello
acquire shifting values, sometimes marking solidarity, at other timesirony, betrayal, or exclusion, thus exposing the precariousness of shared semantic ground. These strategies oftenrely on citation, reported dialogue, and paratextual markers such as italics or quotation marks, which guide thereader in recognizing the contexted nature of meaning. Likewise, when dealing with traditional practices—such asmourning rituals, accusations of witchcraft, or hierarchies of kinship—the authors explicitly clarify, distancethemselves from, or reframe these cultural codes, thereby positioning themselves in relation to both the communityof origin and the Italian readership.
Finally, the paper argues that these acts of negotiation both help the authorsmove between different cultural contexts and allow them to build new forms of identity. Negotiation of meaning thusemerges not only as a discursive device, but also as a socio-literary strategy of identity reconfiguration in post-migrant writing, where individual trajectories intersect with broader collective experiences of displacement,belonging, and resistance.