“Coming Home: Rethinking Migration and Queerness in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt”

This volume, which appears in the series “Le Zebre” on the tenth anniversary of the foundation of the Center for Studies on the Languages of Identities at the University of Bergamo (October 1998), collects essays that were first presented at the XIX Biennial International Conference of the Italian Association of North-American Studies (AISNA), held in Macerata on October 4-6, 2007. The conference was entitled USA: Identities, Cultures, and Politics in National, Transnational, and Global Perspectives, and most of the contributions come from the workshop organized by Vincenzo Bavaro and Raffaella Malandrino on Queer Migrations: Identities across the Borders - all in the plural, of course, and in the planetary perspectives that are today’s mark. The hermeneutical category of “queer” is adopted by all contributors as the one that best enables us to discern the intricate weaving of sexual and national identities in the most disparate literary and cultural products linking the United States, Europe, and Asia. From their specific focuses and in their convergent approach, these essays prove how queer definitely cuts across the borders of its original gay and lesbian territory, and how vastly and subtly it can travel in time and space, in conspicuous ways as well as under the skin of cultural bodies. One could indeed argue that, while in most nations across the planet the material, political, and juridical statuses of queer people are still badly impaired, in most of this same planet queer seems to have infiltrated and destabilized significant mainstream and transnational domains.