Transnational Italian comics as countermemories of the nation

This article is situated within the growing field of Transnational Italian Comics, a body of scholarship that examines how graphic narratives challenge nationally bounded understandings of Italian culture, identity, and belonging. Emerging at the intersection of migration studies, postcolonial studies, and comics scholarship, this field has highlighted the capacity of comics to represent experiences that exceed the linguistic, cultural, and territorial borders of the nation-state (Spadaro Reference Spadaro2020; Mandolini Reference Mandolini2022; Comberiati and Spadaro Reference Comberiati and Spadaro2023; Mangiavillano Reference Mangiavillano2023; Pezzotti and Ricatti Reference Pezzotti and Ricatti2023; Spadaro and Stamboulis Reference Spadaro, Stamboulis, Spadaro and Comberiati2026).

Rather than proposing a comprehensive overview of the field, I approach transnational comics as a particularly productive site for investigating the relationship between memory and national narratives. As several scholars have noted, graphic narratives are especially suited to representing experiences marked by mobility, multilingualism, and cultural negotiation (Merino Reference Merino2010; Zanettin Reference Zanettin2015; Mickwitz Reference Mickwitz2019; Appleton Reference Appleton2021; Kelp-Stebbins Reference Kelp-Stebbins2022; Kauranen et al. Reference Kauranen, Löytty, Nikkilä and Vuorinne2023; Ebesu Reference Ebesu2024). Their multimodal nature allows different temporalities, geographies, languages, and perspectives to coexist within the same narrative space.

Two concepts are particularly relevant to the present analysis: fragmentation and translation. Migration and transnationality have often been described through these categories, which challenge coherent understandings of language, identity, and belonging. In the context of comics, translation should be understood not only as a linguistic operation but also as a broader cultural and epistemological practice through which subjects navigate different symbolic worlds (Zanettin Reference Zanettin2015; Mangiavillano Reference Mangiavillano2023).

The notion of fragmentation is equally significant. As Bindi (Reference Bindi2019) and Raffaelli (Reference Bindi and Raffaelli2021) argue in their reflections on underground comics and visual cultures, fragmentation concerns not only narrative form but also bodies, memories, and social histories that resist incorporation into homogeneous national frameworks. This perspective is especially useful for understanding the relationship between memory and countermemory. As scholars of comics have observed, graphic narratives have often functioned as vehicles for the representation of marginalised experiences, offering alternative accounts of histories excluded from dominant public narratives (Mickwitz Reference Mickwitz2019; Santos Reference Santos2019; Ebesu Reference Ebesu2024). Their formal openness allows different voices, temporalities, and perspectives to coexist without necessarily being reconciled into a single interpretative framework.

Questions of authorship also occupy a central position within Transnational Italian Comics scholarship, particularly as a question of positionality. As Comberiati and Spadaro (Reference Comberiati and Spadaro2023) have observed, refugee comics are often produced from the perspective of the receiving country, since they are frequently authored by journalists, humanitarian workers, or individuals involved in NGO rescue operations.

This issue acquires particular significance in the Italian context, where representations of migrants have historically been shaped by humanitarian discourses deeply entangled with the colonial myth of the italiani brava gente (decent Italians) and with broader attempts to disavow historical responsibility (Del Boca Reference Del Boca and Braude2024). As several scholars have shown, narratives of solidarity and hospitality can coexist with paternalistic forms of representation that reproduce asymmetrical relations between those who speak and those who are spoken for (Giuliani and Panico Reference Giuliani and Panico2022).

At the opposite end of the spectrum, many migratory comics belong to the productive field of autobiographical graphic novels, being authored by migrants or second-generation subjects themselves. The historical importance of these narratives – particularly in producing political memories of marginalised and racialised communities – cannot be underestimated (Mickwitz Reference Mickwitz2019; Ebesu Reference Ebesu2024). Yet, as we will see, they may also risk confining migrant and second-generation authors to a primarily testimonial role, interpellating them only to recount their personal histories and memories of migration.

Rather than treating these positions as mutually exclusive, I propose approaching the two graphic novels through a blurred and transnational dimension of memory (De Cesari and Rigney Reference De Cesari and Rigney2014). From this perspective, migration becomes not simply an object of representation but a privileged point of observation from which to narrate the nation itself. The gaze articulated by transnational subjectivities is neither fully internal nor fully external; rather, it inhabits the unstable space between these categories, making visible histories, exclusions, and forms of memory that nationalist narratives tend to obscure (Salerno and Violi Reference Salerno and Violi2021).

This perspective is particularly relevant to the present article because the two graphic novels analysed here emerge from markedly different positions. While Hysi narrates experiences closely connected to his own migratory trajectory, Croma approaches Albanian migration from a position external to that experience but explicitly concerned with questions of historical responsibility, memory, and solidarity. The contrast between these positions does not simply concern representation; it reveals different ways of constructing countermemories capable of challenging dominant narratives of Italian identity.

Bari, August 1991: From the Southern other to the Albanian other

On August 8, 1991, the port of Bari in Southern Italy – chosen by Mussolini as the launching point for Italy’s commercial and colonial expansion towards the BalkansFootnote ³ (Basciani Reference Basciani2022) – witnessed the arrival of the overloaded ship Vlora. Carrying approximately 20,000 people fleeing Albania’s post-communist instability, the ship became one of the most iconic events in contemporary Italian migration history, turning symbolically Italy in a country of immigration than of emigration (Bond et al. Reference Bond, Bonsaver and Faloppa2015). Recorded by local television and broadcast live on national media (Pesole Reference Pesole and Giuliani2015), the arrival rapidly acquired a symbolic significance exceeding the event itself. As Fusco (Reference Fusco and Fusco2021) argues, the Vlora became a prototype for the new media narrative surrounding immigration. Terms such as ‘invasion’, ‘exodus’, and ‘wave’ increasingly dominated public discourse, contributing to the racialisation of Albanians and to the consolidation of a migration crisis narrative that would shape Italian debates for decades.

The arrival of the Vlora is frequently remembered – particularly in the commemorative activities surrounding its thirtieth anniversary in 2021 – as a moment exemplifying the solidarity and welcoming spirit of Italians in contrast to contemporary racism (Dammacco Reference Dammacco2021). This narrative is especially pronounced in representations of Southern Italians, often portrayed as more open and empathetic because of their own histories of marginalisation and emigration (Polizzi Reference Polizzi2022). Yet beneath this celebratory memory lies a more ambivalent history, deeply entangled with nationalism, border regimes, and internal hierarchies of belonging.

Scholars have analysed the ‘mirrored representations’ (King and Mai Reference King and Mai2002) linking Italy and Albania across both colonial and postcolonial attitudes. These dynamics respectively emerged through Italy’s attempts to dominate Albania, culminating in Mussolini’s invasion in 1939, and were later reactivated through the Albanian migrations of the 1990s.

This convergence of historical ties and the sense of solidarity towards the little brothers from Albania – echoing colonial-era representations that positioned Albanians as closer to Italians than African colonial subjects (Giuliani Reference Giuliani, Giuliani and Lombardi-Diop2013) – combined paternalism with proximity. It contributed to a self-representation of Italians, and particularly Southern Italians, as generous, fraternal, and welcoming. As such, it resonates with what Del Boca (Reference Del Boca and Braude2024) identifies as the enduring myth of the italiani brava gente, a trope portraying Italians as benevolent colonisers while obscuring the asymmetrical power relations and colonial legacies embedded within these encounters.

At the same time, Albanian migration became the primary external figure around which a renewed national identity was constructed. As Mai (Reference Mai2003, 88) argues, ‘the external other, replacing the Southern Italian as the internal other, was dangerous because it reminded Italy of its own Southern past of poverty, emigration, and brigandage’. This shift should not be understood as a simple substitution. Rather, Albanian migration reactivated and transformed pre-existing structures of otherness within Italian national culture. If Southern Italy had historically functioned as the nation’s internal other, the emergence of large-scale migration repositioned the South as border, gateway, and guardian of the nation. The management of migration thus became one of the mechanisms through which older and newer hierarchies of belonging were reorganised.

This dynamic became particularly visible in Bari itself. Following the arrival of the Vlora, thousands of migrants were confined within the Stadio della Vittoria before being deported. Beyond the emergency itself, the stadium became an early laboratory for practices of segregation, detention, and migration management later incorporated into Italy’s border regime (Esposito et al. Reference Esposito, Ornelas and Arcidiacono2015). Significantly, these developments occurred in Southern Italy, a region historically represented as peripheral and backward, yet increasingly central to the governance of mobility. As Polizzi (Reference Polizzi2022, 79) notes, the South became a crucial site for the ‘management and differential inclusion of people, places and labour force’, anticipating developments later generalised at national and European levels.

The gradual disappearance of Albanian migration from public debate should not be interpreted as the resolution of these dynamics. On the contrary, the relative integration of Albanians into Italian society – facilitated in part by their increasing perception as ‘whiter’ than newer migrant groups (King and Mai Reference King and Mai2002) – contributed to obscuring both the discrimination they experienced and their role in reshaping Italian understandings of race, belonging, and national identity. Albanian migration therefore occupies a peculiar position within contemporary Italian memory culture: simultaneously foundational and forgotten.

Recent scholarship has begun to address these types of entanglements. Drawing on Rothberg’s (Reference Rothberg2009) critique of competitive memory, Bellin and Bartolini’s (Reference Bellin and Bartolini2024) collective work explores the overlapping histories of Italian marginalisation through the notion of multidirectional forgetting. Their intervention is particularly relevant to the Italian context, where collective memory frequently oscillates between the denial of colonial responsibility and narratives of national victimhood rooted in the Southern Question, mass emigration, and other experiences of subalternity (Panico Reference Panico2024a). As a result, memories are often positioned as mutually exclusive rather than relational.

The Albanian case complicates this logic. It intersects with memories of colonial expansion, Southern marginalisation, mass emigration, border violence, and contemporary racism without being reducible to any of them. Rather than replacing one memory with another, Albanian migration reveals how different histories of exclusion become articulated through changing configurations of otherness. In this sense, multidirectional memory provides a useful framework not because it dissolves differences between historical experiences but because it allows us to analyse how they enter into relation, transformation, and negotiation.

This perspective is particularly productive for the analysis of Jepi Jora and L’invasione degli extraterroni. The two graphic novels do not simply recount migration histories. Rather, they activate a constellation of interconnected memories – Albanian migration, Southern Italian marginalisation, historical emigration, and the arrival of new migrant communities after the 1990s – while challenging narratives of national homogeneity. In doing so, they move beyond the logic of competitive memories and reveal the entanglements of privilege, responsibility, and exclusion that continue to shape contemporary Italian memory cultures.

‘Non dimenticare’: Remediating personal and collective memories of migration

In many ways, the history of immigration debates and representations in Italy began with the image of the Vlora (Caliandro Reference Caliandro2016). The extensive visual archive documenting the arrival of the ship has permeated Italian collective memory through photography, television, cinema, documentary, and advertising productionFootnote ⁶ (Mai Reference Mai2005). As discussed in the introduction, both Jepi Jora and L’invasione degli extraterroni can be read as instances of remediation (Erll and Rigney Reference Erll and Rigney2009). Rather than simply reproducing archival images, they reassemble and reinterpret them through the specific affordances of the comics medium (Kelp-Stebbins Reference Kelp-Stebbins2022). Following Montani’s (Reference Montani2022) notion of immaginazione intermediale, this process can be understood as a montage of heterogeneous visual memories that generates new ways of seeing the past.

Both graphic novels intervene in this archive, reworking memories of Albanian migration through graphic narratives that move between personal recollection, family histories, and collective remembrance rooted in media representations.

The memory of migration is particularly central in Jepi Jora. Designed in what Croma defines as a ‘synthetic aesthetic’, characterised by thick black lines and a strong contrast between fullness and emptiness, the graphic novel follows a non-linear timeline in which the protagonist’s return journey to Albania in 2011 constantly intertwines with memories of her childhood. Throughout the first half of the narrative, references to the landscapes of rural Albania evoke specific sounds, smells, and emotions connected to her early life. These recollections are accompanied by the recurring injunction non dimenticare (‘do not forget’) (p. 40), initially voiced by family members and gradually transformed into a personal mantra. What begins as a familial recommendation becomes an intimate reflection on belonging, estrangement, and the impossibility of preserving an unaltered connection to one’s place of origin.

The centrality of memory is reinforced through the graphic novel’s structure. Jora’s story begins with the decision of her family to send her to Italy through Butan, a family friend who announces the opening of the port in Durazzo and offers to accompany her across the Adriatic. Yet from the opening pages the reader also knows that, 20 years later, Jora is retracing the same route in the opposite direction. Her bicycle journey across Southern Italy towards Bari creates a constant dialogue between departure and return, childhood and adulthood, remembrance and re-signification.

The mirroring of the two journeys across the Adriatic Sea provides one of the graphic novel’s most significant visual strategies. When adult Jora ship sailed, Bari is represented from the sea, reversing the perspective through which the arrival of the Vlora entered Italian public memory. Rather than observing migrants from the shore – and thus assuming a state-centred and nationally bounded perspective – the reader is invited to look at Italy from the position of arrival itself. This relocation of the gaze recalls what bell hooks (1992) conceptualised as an oppositional gaze: yet the perspective articulated here is not simply external to Italy. Jora’s position is already shaped by 20 years of life, memories, relationships, and experiences within the country. The visual reversal therefore does not replace an Italian gaze with an Albanian one; rather, it relocates the point of observation to a transnational subjectivity situated across both sides of the Adriatic (Salerno and Violi Reference Salerno and Violi2021; Bond and Comberiati Reference Bond and Comberiati2023). Italy appears simultaneously as a place of arrival and departure, belonging and estrangement.

The contrast between the two vessels reinforces this operation. The clean and orderly ferry carrying Jora back to Albania is juxtaposed with the memory of the overcrowded and deteriorating Vlora. The ship appears as a dark silhouette emerging from an almost entirely white page, emphasising its overwhelming visual presence while simultaneously evoking the iconic media images that saturated Italian television during the 1990s. In preparing the graphic novel, Croma not only drew on her childhood memories of seeing the Vlora on television but also worked extensively with photographic archives and footage of the ship itself. The visual archive of the Vlora is thus remediated through a graphic form that simultaneously recalls official documentation and personal memory, reassembling them into a new configuration capable of producing different forms of historical understanding.

Here, the injunction non dimenticare gradually expands beyond the sphere of personal memory. Recalling the crossing, Jora remembers ‘her own desire and that of 20,000 others in the same place’ (p. 135). Individual recollection thus gives way to a collective dimension. The following double-page spread presents a mosaic of anonymous faces of Vlora’s passengers, arranged in small squares reminiscent of identification photographs.

The composition evokes both individuality and collectivity. On the one hand, the format recalls bureaucratic systems of identification, documentation, and registration – elements that profoundly shape migrant lives. On the other, it restores singularity to people who were frequently represented as an anonymous mass within media discourses. The mosaic simultaneously evokes the intimacy of individual lives and the forced proximity produced by the crossing itself, transforming the collective image of the Vlora into a constellation of distinct yet interconnected stories.

A similar memory operation structures L’invasione degli extraterroni, although through a different aesthetic register and a different mechanism of identification offered to the reader. The graphic novel adopts a denser black-and-white style that, according to Rapa, ‘recalls twentieth-century Albanian visual traditions’ and introduces memory through another form of mirroring. The narrative opens with Renald waiting in an Italian tribunal in 2016 while attempting to obtain citizenship after almost 20 years of residence. The frustrations produced by the bureaucratic process trigger a flashback to the port of Valona in 1997, where Renald, his mother, and his brother waited to board a ship to ItalyFootnote ⁷.

The visual parallel between the tribunal and the port is striking. Despite representing radically different situations, both spaces operate through mechanisms of exclusion and differential inclusion (Mezzadra and Neilson Reference Mezzadra and Neilson2013). The port embodies the precariousness of migrants’ lives, while the tribunal represents the institutional regulation of their exclusion. Through this mirrored composition, the graphic novel reveals the continuity between border and citizenship regimes. Migration does not end upon arrival but persists through the bureaucratic management of inclusion and exclusion. In both scenes, migrants appear as an indistinct crowd, anonymised by the systems that classify, de-humanise, and contain them. Yet Renald’s family – emerging from a personal and familial archive of memory – simultaneously stands out from and blends into the collective mass, embodying the tension between individual experience and historical process that structures the graphic novel as a whole.

Animal imagery, a vital narrative device in comics (Chaney Reference Chaney2011), further reinforces these dynamics of remediation and memory-making. In L’invasione, smugglers are represented as wolves and dogs, emphasising relations of violence and domination through animal figures. As Hysi explained during our interview, the choice was partly inspired by the legacy of Spiegelman’s Maus. Yet rather than categorising entire groups, animalisation serves to soften a narrative rooted in difficult childhood memories while preserving its emotional intensity. In this sense, the device can also be read as reflecting a child’s attempt to make sense of threatening social relations through familiar symbolic forms. As scholars working at the intersection of comics and memory studies have noted in relation to Maus and its legacy (Hirsch Reference Hirsch2001; Merino Reference Merino2010), animal figures can function simultaneously as mediators of traumatic memory and as visual strategies through which difficult experiences become narratable.

Animal imagery performs a different function in Jepi Jora. Here animals appear as protective presences – or numi tutelari – accompanying the protagonist throughout her journey. Rather than suggesting danger, they create a porous boundary between human and non-human worlds, emphasising Jora’s particular sensitivity to multiple forms of belonging and perception. Much like the transnational perspective that structures the graphic novel, these figures move across boundaries that are usually presented as fixed, connecting different spaces, memories, and forms of life.

In both graphic novels, animals become visual mediators through which experiences of migration, fear, care, and remembrance are translated into graphic form. They contribute to the construction of memory not simply by illustrating events but by providing symbolic frameworks through which personal and collective experiences can be perceived, narrated, and remembered.

If memory provides the narrative trigger for both graphic novels, media constitute the space through which these memories circulate, become visible, and enter the public sphere, as we will see in the next section.

‘(Non) è la Rai’: Media, migration, and the politics of looking

The postcolonial relationship between Italy and Albania has long been mediated through television. Due to geographical proximity and the asymmetrical cultural relationship between the two countries, Italian broadcasting occupied a central role in the Albanian imaginary both during and after the communist period. As several scholars have observed (Mai Reference Mai2003; Pesole Reference Pesole and Giuliani2015), Italian television contributed to constructing Italy as a space of prosperity, freedom, and modernity, producing a powerful imaginary that accompanied the migratory flows of the 1990s.

Yet the same medium that contributed to producing the desire for Italy would later transform Albanian migrants into objects of observation.

This mediated dimension of migration is particularly evident in both graphic novels. Before departure, Jora is frequently portrayed watching Italian television from Albania, while Renald and his brother spend their childhood watching Italian cartoons. Long before crossing the Adriatic, Italy is already present in their lives as an image, a language, and a promise. Television thus functions as a bridge connecting the two shores of the Canale d’Otranto, anticipating the physical crossing that follows.

The arrival of migrants at Italian ports abruptly reversed the direction of the gaze. The people who had consumed Italian television suddenly became its protagonists. Through extensive media coverage, Albanian migrants were represented as suffering bodies crowded onto ships, exhausted by travel, and exposed to the gaze of the receiving society. As Zucconi (Reference Zucconi2013) argues, these repeated ‘iconographies of pain’ drew upon a longer visual archive of sacred representations of suffering, mobilising emotional responses grounded in pity and compassion.

In the context of arrivals at Apulian ports, media portrayals of migrants disembarking from overcrowded ships contributed to their dehumanisation in ways that oscillated between paternalism and criminalisation. Albanian migrants became the protagonists of the same broadcasts that had once sold them the ‘Italian dream’. This process recalls Susan Sontag’s (Reference Sontag2013) reflections in Regarding the Pain of Others, where the reduction of subjects to suffering bodies risks transforming them into objects of observation rather than agents of their own histories. Such representations limit possibilities for self-representation and autonomy, centring instead the gaze of the observer – typically located within the receiving society – who is encouraged to identify not with the migrant, but with the position of witness, helper, or saviour (Giuliani and Panico Reference Giuliani and Panico2022).

The media’s focus on the physical condition of arriving passengers – the visible signs of hunger, thirst, and exhaustion – played a central role in shaping public perceptions of Albanian migration, beginning with the images of the Vlora. Initially represented as vulnerable little brothers of the colonial era, Albanians were later increasingly portrayed as dirty, infectious, and potentially dangerous. This shift reflects a racialised discourse in which ‘dirtiness’ functions as a symbolic degradation of whiteness (Lombardi-Diop Reference Lombardi-Diop, Lombardi-Diop and Giuliani2013), contributing to the stigmatisation of Albanian migrants and anticipating the moral panics that would characterise the following decade.

Both graphic novels engage critically with this visual archive, highlighting the ambivalent position of migrants within media narratives, suspended between compassion, paternalism, and criminalisation.

This tension emerges clearly in Jepi Jora. Rather than reproducing some of the most iconic and degrading images associated with Albanian arrivals, Croma deliberately avoids depicting Jora and Butan among the migrants confined in the Stadio della Vittoria. Instead, the graphic novel imagines their escape towards Rome. This narrative choice restores agency to the protagonists and refuses to reduce them to passive objects of observation. By avoiding the spectacularisation of suffering, the graphic novel intervenes critically in a visual archive that has often relied on migrant vulnerability as a source of emotional identification and paternalistic recognition.

Television nevertheless remains central to Jora’s understanding of Italy. In a significant sequence, she watches Non è la Rai, one of the most emblematic entertainment programmes of the 1990s. Populated by dozens of young women singing and dancing carefree, the show became a symbol of the media culture associated with Berlusconi’s Italy and its promises of prosperity, consumption, and individual success. In a mirrored panel, Jora’s father is shown watching the same programme from Albania, imagining for his daughter the forms of well-being and social mobility promised by television.

The juxtaposition creates a powerful visual bridge across the Adriatic. Television becomes a shared space through which father and daughter remain connected despite separation. At the same time, it reveals how migration is shaped by mediated imaginaries. The Italy imagined through television is not simply a destination but a fantasy of modernity and possibility that accompanies both migrants and those left behind.

The importance of this bridge is also reflected in the media landscape of the period. As Pesole (Reference Pesole and Giuliani2015) notes, during the years of peak Albanian migration, broadcasters such as Telenorba developed programmes specifically directed at Albanian audiences, ranging from information campaigns to entertainment shows. These initiatives often sought to complicate or counterbalance the excessively idyllic image of Italy – and, in particular, Southern Italy – that circulated across the Adriatic, producing a transnational counter-narrative.

If Jepi Jora foregrounds television as a bridge connecting the two shores of the Adriatic, L’invasione degli extraterroni reveals the more ambivalent dimensions of that mediation. Television not only remains a space of connection but also becomes one of the dispositifs through which migrants are transformed into objects of representation, exposed to a gaze oscillating between compassion, paternalism, and criminalisation.

Figure 7.

Hysi and Rapa (Reference Hysi and Rapa2023). L’invasione, p. 78.

Figure 7. Long description

The comic consists of four panels arranged in a two-by-two grid.

* Top-left panel: A close-up of a television screen showing three anthropomorphic animal characters. A cat-like character on the right holds a microphone toward a bear-like character in the center who is speaking animatedly. A smaller character stands on the left. A caption box below reads: “Mio padre seguiva dall’Albania tutti i notiziari italiani che parlavano degli sbarchi” (“My father watched from Albania all the Italian news broadcasts that talked about the landings”).

* Top-right panel: The same television screen is shown with heavy horizontal static lines and a R E W 0:10 indicator in the top right corner, suggesting a V H S recording being rewound. The caption box below reads: “Era riuscito a registrare lo spezzone di quella trasmissione” (“He had managed to record that segment of the broadcast”).

* Bottom-left panel: A wide shot shows a man sitting in an armchair in a dark room, facing the glowing television screen. He holds a remote control. The caption box above him reads: “Per settimane la rivede in loop” (“For weeks, he watched it on loop”).

* Bottom-right panel: A similar wide shot where the room is even darker, with the man still sitting in the armchair, leaning his head on his hand while watching the screen. The caption box above reads: “Quella era l’unica notizia che aveva avuto di noi dalla nostra partenza” (“That was the only news he had received about us since our departure”).

Figure 8.

Hysi and Rapa (Reference Hysi and Rapa2023). L’invasione, pp. 144-145.

Figure 8. Long description

The illustration is divided into several symbolic zones.

* On the left, a large character in profile looks through a small handheld lens toward the center.

* At the top center, a hopper filled with spheres marked with religious and ideological symbols (such as the crescent and star, and gender symbols) pours a dark liquid onto a globe. A text box above it reads: For example, the intolerance created towards metics changes subject but persists because it is functional to deviate from the structural problem.

* In the top right background, a ship is sinking in a dark, turbulent sea under a starry sky.

* In the bottom right, a large structure resembling a monument has a text box that reads: The most hated nationality in Italy before the Albanians? Italians, obviously, North against South, Savoy against Bourbons. In the 90s we both entered with straight legs, winning the podium for a decade. September 11, 2001, Twin Towers, was the event that ousted us.

* In the center, the Earth is being splashed by the dark liquid from above while several airplanes fly toward it, surrounded by smoke and small projectile-like objects.

* The bottom foreground features a swirling cosmic or mechanical landscape with small spheres and rectangular blocks marked with symbols like I N M.

Figure 9.

Croma (2021). Jepi Jora, p. 102.

Following his arrival in Italy, Renald is detained with his family in a temporary reception centre established in a former convent in Lecce. It is there that a crew from the national broadcaster RAI arrives looking for people to interview in the aftermath of the sinking of the Kater i Radës (Leogrande Reference Leogrande2011). Because of his familiarity with Italian television and his ability to speak the language, Renald is selected to appear on camera.Footnote ⁸

The scene condenses many of the contradictions surrounding media representations of Albanian migration. On the one hand, television appears as a space of connection: Renald’s father, who remained in Valona, watches the interview and finally receives news about his family. The same medium that had previously introduced Italy into Albanian homes now allows migrants to communicate across borders. On the other hand, the scene reveals that this mediation is never neutral: Renald enters the public sphere only insofar as his story can be incorporated into a broader narrative of tragedy, suffering, and humanitarian concern.

Significantly, it is through the tears of the journalist interviewing him that Renald learns about the disaster of the Kater i Radës. The reporter’s emotional response highlights the ambivalence of humanitarian representation. Compassion for migrant suffering coexists with a media environment that, throughout the 1990s, contributed to the construction of Albanians as a social threat. The same media system that mourned the dead would soon participate in the criminalisation of the living.

By revisiting these scenes, both graphic novels expose the central role of television in shaping the memory of Albanian migration. More than a simple instrument of communication, television appears as a space where desires, fears, stereotypes, and forms of belonging are continuously negotiated. Through remediation, the graphic novels recover these mediated memories and relocate them within the experiences of those who originally appeared only as objects of representation.

‘Voi extracomunitari mi state più simpatici dei terroni’: Translated memories and fragmented identities of multiple Italies

As discussed in the theoretical framework, multilingualism in transnational comics challenges the tendency to understand language through nationally bounded frameworks, foregrounding instead processes of translation, negotiation, and cultural encounter (Mangiavillano Reference Mangiavillano2023). In both Jepi Jora and L’invasione degli extraterroni, language becomes a privileged site through which memories, identities, and narratives of national belonging are fragmented and reassembled.

In Jepi Jora, Italian and Albanian coexist throughout the narrative, thanks to the collaboration between Croma and two Albanian language consultants. Particular attention is dedicated to reproducing the linguistic specificities of the mountainous region from which Jora originates, challenging homogenising representations of Albania often circulating within Italian public discourse. Albanian contributes to the construction of a credible narrative world while simultaneously producing moments of estrangement for Italian readers confronted with a language that remains partially opaque.

More significantly, language functions as a repository of familial and cultural memory. It becomes one of the means through which Jora maintains a connection to a place she simultaneously remembers and reimagines. This dynamic also shapes the Italian used throughout the graphic novel, which frequently reproduces Albanian expressions and syntactical structures. Phrases such as ‘You can bend an Albanian as you can bend a mountain’, spoken by Jora’s mother, produce a hybrid linguistic space that is neither entirely Albanian nor entirely Italian. The result is a language that simultaneously conveys cultural specificity, reflects the experience of inhabiting multiple worlds, and introduces a subtle estrangement into the reading experience.

While Jepi Jora stages translation across the Adriatic, L’invasione degli extraterroni further complicates this picture by exposing the linguistic fractures internal to Italy itself. Alongside Italian and Albanian, Hysi devotes considerable attention to the Salentino dialect spoken in the small village where he spent his first years after migration. In this peripheral context, particularly among working-class communities, standard Italian cannot be taken for granted and may even be perceived as distant or hostile. Dialect and Italian constantly overlap, blurring the boundaries between linguistic registers and challenging assumptions of national homogeneity.

It is through this mixture of languages that Renald first encounters racism, despite the self-absolving representations of Southern Italy as inherently welcoming because of its own history of marginalisation. Beyond the term Albanese itself, frequently used as an insult during the 1990s, he is addressed through local expressions such as latuerno (troublemaker) (p. 89), malota (cockroach) (p. 101), or mucculone Albanese (Albanian crybaby) (p. 91).

Rather than confirming narratives of Southern solidarity, L’invasione captures the moment in which a historically marginalised region began to activate xenophobic forms of exclusion in order to distinguish itself from newcomers and claim a more secure place within the national community. In this sense, the graphic novel illustrates the workings of what Rothberg (Reference Rothberg2009) describes as competitive memory, whereby previous experiences of marginalisation become mobilised not to create solidarity but to reinforce new hierarchies of belonging (Panico Reference Panico2024a). The hostility experienced by Renald is inseparable from the broader media environment of the period, marked by the hyper-visibility of crimes attributed to Albanians and by narratives that transformed migrants into objects of fear and resentment, particularly within peripheral and economically fragile contexts.

Despite arriving with a strong familiarity with Italian, Renald gradually acquires a marked Southern accent together with local dialect expressions. The significance of this process becomes fully visible when his family migrates again, this time from Puglia to the Marche region. Moving northwards reveals a paradox already embedded within Italy’s linguistic landscape. Differences in accent, dialect, social norms, and everyday practices expose the limits of narratives of national homogeneity. Through successive migrations, Renald comes to inhabit multiple margins simultaneously, revealing the internal fractures through which Italianity itself is produced and negotiated.

This realisation culminates in one of the pivotal scenes of the graphic novel. Confused by his accent, a northern Italian peer initially identifies him as a Southerner and insults him as a terrone. Upon discovering his Albanian origins, however, the boy immediately revises his judgement: ‘I like you extracomunitari better than the terroni’ (p. 110).

The scene condenses multiple histories of exclusion into a single encounter. The opposition between foreigner and citizen is suddenly complicated by the hierarchy separating Northern and Southern Italy. Confronted with this paradox, Renald develops the notion of the extraterrone, a term combining extracomunitario and terrone while simultaneously destabilising both categories, evoking an alien invasion represented with a sci-fi visual imaginary.

Abdelmalek Sayad (Reference Sayad2004) famously described migration as a condition of double absence, whereby migrants find themselves suspended between the country of origin and the receiving society. Renald’s self-identification as an extraterrone suggests a further complication of this framework. I argue that the concept points towards a condition of triple absence, in which multiple migrations intersect. Renald crosses not only the administrative border of the Italian nation-state but also the symbolic border separating Northern and Southern Italy. As a consequence, he is positioned simultaneously outside Albania, outside the imagined national community, and outside the dominant narratives through which Italianity itself is constructed. The figure of the extraterrone therefore reveals how migration intersects with pre-existing internal hierarchies, producing forms of exclusion that cannot be adequately understood through a simple binary between origin and destination.

Yet this condition should not be understood solely as a deficit. As the graphic novel repeatedly suggests, the instability of the extraterrone also generates a privileged point of observation from which national identities can be questioned and deconstructed. Rather than resolving these tensions, the extraterrone inhabits them. Produced through successive acts of linguistic, cultural, and territorial translation, this subjectivity exposes the fractures concealed by narratives of national homogeneity and reveals Italy itself as a fragmented and contested space.

‘Questa Italia che si scopre oggi razzista’: Multidirectional memories and implicated subjectivities

The multidirectional dimension of both graphic novels emerges through their capacity to place Albanian migration in dialogue with other histories of exclusion, marginalisation, and mobility that have shaped Italian society. Rather than presenting migration as an isolated experience, Jepi Jora and L’invasione degli extraterroni connect it to memories of internal migration, colonialism, gender violence, labour exploitation, and contemporary racism. These connections do not erase the specificity of different experiences; rather, they reveal how different histories of marginalisation become entangled within the same social and national space.

This dynamic is particularly evident in Jepi Jora through the character of Dario, one of Jora’s classmates and later aggressors. Dario is described as ‘born and raised in Borgata Gordiani, but the child of migrations and journeys of hope’ (p. 56), the son of Southern Italian migrants who arrived in Rome during the great internal migrations of the postwar decades. The graphic novel thus places side by side two different histories of mobility: the migration of Southern Italians and the arrival of Albanian migrants in the 1990s.

Yet shared histories of marginalisation do not automatically generate solidarity. Dario repeatedly directs racist and sexist violence towards Jora, attempting to secure a position of relative inclusion within the national community through the exclusion of someone perceived as even more marginal. In this sense, the graphic novel exposes the competitive dynamics discussed earlier: previous experiences of exclusion become disconnected from the recognition of contemporary forms of racism and inequality. Rather than producing identification, memories of marginalisation can be mobilised to reinforce new hierarchies of belonging.

The question of belonging is further complicated through Jora’s experience as a migrant woman. Throughout the graphic novel, she encounters patriarchal violence in multiple forms. She is harassed at school, exiled by her father from Albania because of her sexual behaviour, and forced into a gendered and racialised labour market in which she begins working as a domestic worker at a very young age. Significantly, the graphic novel does not use these experiences to construct Albania as exceptionally patriarchal or culturally backwards. On the contrary, Croma repeatedly situates patriarchal violence within broader social structures that cut across national boundaries. Jora’s father reacts to the news of his daughter’s sexuality according to expectations that, as the author suggests, could be found ‘in Molise or in some small villages in Northern Italy’ as much as in Albania’.

The patriarchal violence Jora encounters in Italy acquires more specific connotations. The graphic novel explicitly connects gendered violence to class privilege and colonial memory through the sexual harassment perpetrated by the wealthy sons of the family for whom she works, described as ‘arrogant, sly, violent, obsessive, still with the mentality of old colonizers’ (p. 106). The reference is particularly significant because it links the possession of women to the possession of land, revealing the persistence of colonial imaginaries within contemporary relations of gender and power.

The multidirectional framework becomes even more explicit in the representation of racialised labour hierarchies. This emerges most clearly when the graphic novel shifts its attention to the agricultural landscapes of Apulia. During her bicycle journey back towards Albania, Jora crosses territories characterised by large-scale agricultural production dependent on migrant labour. The visual composition is particularly revealing: while Jora is represented in movement, crossing the landscape on her bicycle, the workers she observes appear largely static, immobilised within the space of agricultural labour. Her gaze is simultaneously one of proximity and distance. She recognises a condition of marginalisation that resonates with her own experience, yet she also confronts forms of racialisation and exploitation that position these workers differently within the Italian labour market.

The significance of this scene lies not only in the presence of migrant communities that arrived in Italy after the Albanian migrations of the 1990s but also in its geographical setting. As discussed earlier, Southern Italy – and Apulia in particular – occupies a liminal position within the national imagination: historically marginalised, yet increasingly central to the management of borders, mobility, and labour. The same region that functioned as a gateway for Albanian migration now hosts forms of exploitation directed primarily at newer racialised migrant communities (Avallone Reference Avallone2017). The graphic novel thus activates a multidirectional relationship between different migratory histories while revealing the persistence of Southern Italy as a crucial site for the differential inclusion and exclusion of labour.

A similar process unfolds in L’invasione degli extraterroni through the experiences of Renald’s family. Upon arriving in Italy, his father – formerly a playwright – works first in the agricultural fields of Apulia and later in factories in the Marche region, while his mother becomes a caregiver for elderly Italians. The downward social mobility experienced by the family reveals the gap between the promises associated with migration and the realities of integration within a racialised and gendered labour market.

The caregiving scenes are particularly revealing. The same elderly Southern Italians who depend on migrant labour recall Albania through the language of empire and conquest. In one sequence, an old man nostalgically remarks: ‘Albania? We had conquered it to invade Greece. It was all ours. We could have won the war’ (p. 87). Colonial memory thus reappears within the intimate space of everyday care, revealing how imperial imaginaries continue to shape contemporary social relations. The scene is especially significant because it places colonial nostalgia alongside the dependence on migrant labour that structures the old man’s everyday life.

The graphic novels ultimately connect these different histories to a broader reflection on Italy’s past as a country of mass emigration. One of the most powerful passages in Jepi Jora explicitly juxtaposes historical Italian emigration with contemporary racism:

‘This little migrant Italy, hungry, measured, and selected; this exploited, discriminated, ghettoized Italy; this little Italy, now forgetful, sanitized, self-righteous; unsettled, frightened (…) this little Italy that now discovers itself racist’ (pp. 80–85).

Rather than presenting Italian emigration as evidence of a naturally welcoming national character, the passage exposes the tensions between memories of departure and contemporary practices of exclusion. Neither the recollection of Italian emigration nor the longer history of Southern marginalisation automatically generates empathy towards migrants. On the contrary, both can become detached from present responsibilities and transformed into self-absolving narratives.

It is precisely against this tendency that both graphic novels operate. By connecting Albanian migration to histories of Southern marginalisation, colonialism, gendered violence, labour exploitation, and emigration, they challenge competitive frameworks of remembrance and reveal the multiple entanglements through which contemporary Italy has been shaped.