Luigi Meneghello: 'I-Taglia', between 'dispatrio' and 'bad dialect'

This article appears in a bilingual (English and Italian) collection of papers that investigates new perceptions of Italian identity in a global context from the standpoint of migration phenomena. The article focuses on the way in which the different forms of dialectal contaminations present in the novels of Luigi Meneghello must be understood in relation to what he defines as his own "dispatrio". "Dispatrio" is a neologism with which Meneghello describes his condition of Italian intellectual living in England and how he is allowed to find his own national identity only by living abroad. Referring to Giorgio Agamben's notion of "coming community", this article further argues that Meneghello's idea of "dispatrio" could entail broader future political implications which go far beyond the sphere of linguistic contamination between national languages and dialects. It finally proposes that a "dispatriated" community is a community in which everyone is considered and considers oneself an "extracomunitario" (the latter being a symptomatic term with which Italians currently refer to migrant workers from the Third World)