In 2013, demographers told us that by the end of this century the majority of Europe’s population will consist of ‘mestizos’, people of mixed descent. Back in 2000, the Saint Lucian Anglophone poet Derek Walcott, Nobel laureate of African and Dutch descent, claimed that the twenty-first century will be the century of the migrants. Today, the question that we should all ask ourselves is how we should prepare to think and act in a constructive way in the face of this ongoing, but silent human transformation? The silence that surrounds us is that of the drowned migrants in the Mediterranean Sea; they will always be our unknown forefathers.

Let us first recall that Europe has developed from a crucial crossbreed, caused by the fierce invasion of the so-called barbarians. They arrived in Europe and the Mediterranean from the north and the east from the fourth to the tenth century AD. They certainly were warriors, but, following the definition preferred from a Germanic perspective, they were also nomadic immigrant people. During those times, lords and clerics gradually developed an awareness that they were becoming something new: Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Historians agree that the term ‘Europeans’ gained recognition, and started to be increasingly used as of 733 CE, when it appeared for the first time in a chronicle written by a cleric from Toledo. He called ‘Europeenses’ the warriors who defeated the Moors at the Battle of Poitiers. Much earlier, in Western Europe, we can find ‘Roman-Barbaric Kingdoms’ that emerged in Italy, France, England, Portugal and Spain. When crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire by the Pope in Rome, in 800 CE, Charlemagne took his place next to and even above the rulers of these kingdom. Charlemagne ruled much of continental Europe, and in first instance those parts that would eventually develop into France and Germany. Thus, the earlier concept of a tri-continental frame, spanning Asia, Africa and Europe, with Rome at the centre of the Mediterranean, became obsolete.

Let us skip now to our modern times, and try to understand the issues of our age in light of the European civilization that during the Early Middle Ages sprung from the bowels of migration. Since the second half of the twentieth century, unarmed individuals from all over the world have arrived in Western Europe to ask us for acceptance, solidarity, work, and dignity by means of justice and mutuality. This is creating the melting pot of the twenty-first century. They bring with them a eutopic project that also addresses us. ² Eutopia is a philosophical concept that greatly differs from the notion of utopia. The ‘u’ in Utopia means ‘not’ and refers to an invented and non-existent place. The ‘eu’ in eutopia means ‘good’ in Greek, and invokes the idea of a just place where we can all live well together. The logic behind the concept of eutopia invites us to consider the possibility of creating a new European civilization, which is conciliatory, co-evolutionary, mutual, hybrid, and Creole. I think that this is the path that we should all walk together, with migrants and European mestizos. This path far transcends the current programme of the European Union, built upon protocols imposed by the market.

In reality, the migrants who have travelled to Europe over the past two centuries did not have in mind such a powerful and complex programme, yet it becomes evident if we consider that they were moved by hope, their common burden. It is also the mutual sharing of hope that invites us Italians to bear in mind our compatriot ancestors who emigrated all over the world for a hundred years, from the unification of Italy towards the end of the nineteenth century until the 1970s. The diaspora of millions of Italians was often called the ‘path of hope’. ³ The current ‘path of hope project’ by the migrants from the entire southern-eastern hemisphere should lead us to reflect on our present situation: yes, we are indeed invaded, right now, but without violence or calamities. On the contrary, this ‘great migration,’ as Hans Magnus Enzensberger called it in 1992, may yield a new and unforeseen rebirth of our civilization: a new transcultural civilization that we must create together; us with them.

Let’s try to assess this concept of hope carried by the migrants who are arriving in Western Europe today. After the fall of the Roman Empire, when the so-called barbaric populations invaded Europe from the north and east, Europe for a long time became the campground of fire and chaos. Today, Europe is teeming with natives and immigrants, and many diverse populations. Let’s consider the 15,000 BCE Asian invasion of the Americas: they encountered a marvellous new continent that was uninhabited, and so they traced a vertical line down the continent until they arrived at the tip of South America, across from Antarctica, which nobody else was to know for another few thousands of years. There were just a few of them who shared that fate and they were surrounded by immense plains and high mountains. Yet they did not return home.

I believe that we can envision this hope actively felt by the migrants in our age through the concept of a special spes naturalis (from Latin: ‘natural hope’) of the human race, a race that for the longest time was homo migrans before it became sapiens. Homo migrans is the distant ancestor of homo sapiens, who continues to be migrans today. This spes naturalis could thus be conceived as a vital, primitive, and long-lived practice of our human species, which is always on the go. It should be regarded neither as a sort of universal trait nor as a transcendental or unknowable principle. Instead, this vital form of our human species should be perceived as an ethological path, which has its own long history of migration toward all horizons, reaching always above and beyond: from Africa to Oceania and Australia. So spes naturalis certainly plays a genetic role, but also a historical one. These two roles combine in our consciousness as a species over the course of human history on Earth. As early as 300,000 BC, we had invaded our entire planet, and scattered everywhere. From ancient times to our twenty-first century, migrants have always changed civilizations and borders; they destroy, marry and blend. Thus, the notion of people migrating under this spes naturalis implies internalizing a risk that is extreme, capital and absurd. This risk will bring migrants to face at any given moment the possibility of finding themselves within the deep abyss created by the demons of denial and indifference, with no supporters who are willing to accept the eutopic pact. This is indeed the endless risk that is sewn in the terror of the poor. It is the primordial and enduring poverty that emerges from the eutopic vision.

Migrants know that, contrary to any logic, they could very well die before being able to find someone who is willing to welcome and listen to them. So, they all line up holding their spes or hope inside their hearts, ready to get lost in the cold waves of the Mediterranean Sea aboard a pontoon abandoned by smugglers or crossing walls and tunnels between Mexico and the United States. Yet the spes naturalis of migrants is unsinkable, even when desperation sets in and logic tries to undermine hope. Spes tells us that it is only fair to migrate, because all the earliest and the most recent historical accounts show how migrants left their humble homes to arrive united in the Northwest, while keeping alive the vital form of the spes naturalis and all the tales about imaginary expectations. The welcome given by Italians to migrants crossing the Mediterranean, in particular through the plan called Mare Nostrum (Latin for ‘our sea’), takes place on the island of Lampedusa, situated at the centre of the Sicilian Channel, which connects Europe to Africa. Welcoming centres, medical shelters, and isothermal blankets support migrants through the ‘good will’ of caretakers, and almost persuade migrants that Europeans assist them actively, and give them the idea that the latter are shaped in their training by common good living, which constitutes the right answer to the concept of natural hope. However, this is not the case.

Let’s now come to terms with some reflections about our modernity, a period spanning five centuries already, and still continuing. ‘We the Europeans,’ at the end of the fifteenth century, ‘discovered’ the Mundus Novus, as Amerigo Vespucci called it. From the conquerors’ point of view, this was an impressive endeavour achieving a more accurate knowledge of the world and the promise of limitless wealth. It was indeed an exceptional endeavour, but it was accomplished through violence and the slaughter of the Native Americans, and later on of the native Australians and Africans, as well as natives all over Asia. ⁴ The migrant Europeans who arrived well-armed in the New World were initially from Spain and Portugal, and later from England, France and Holland. They invited their fellow Europeans, especially from the north and WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), to relocate to the large US nation so they would be able to better their lives. This is the project that people have come to call ‘the American dream,’ the myth of the wonderful migration invented by the Americans. These multifaceted historical subjects – complemented by millions of free Africans made slaves and brought to the plantations and mines of the European owners in the Americas – have marked the modernity of Europe. It is this modernity that I seek to understand and analyse thoroughly, well beyond the Postcolonial Studies established over the last 30 years at US universities and propagated by followers in Europe and worldwide.

I propose to conceive of modernity as a sequence of 500 planetary years, which European people shaped and imposed upon the entire world by projecting the viewpoint of our modern history on the ‘global history of all nations’. Thus, modernity has become the ‘modern history’ of the world that has been transmitted by the European warriors, settlers, slave drivers and owners imposing their will, through violence, all over the world. They imposed on everybody their civilization, projecting it as the epic of the entire world, which became the planet of conquest, subjugation, and exploitation. This is the epic of the conquerors and slayers, who for 500 years successfully (albeit only for a portion of men) have wrought upon the Earth a never-ending ‘First World War’.

As the Mexican poet Octavio Paz has suggested, the ‘new’ populations ‘discovered’ by modernity were in fact ‘condemned to modernity’. Only now, if we engage in a radical critique of our modern civilization, undertaken also by the colonized heirs, will we be able to perceive European modernity as something unfinished. Starting from today, Europeans must begin to learn that injustice gains its lasting power through us who have brought it in the world. The time has come to decolonize our own minds and our own traditions in order to be able to see clearly at last the true ‘white man’s burden’: the deceitful myth of the ‘western and universal’ that divulges the European dominion through the solemn commitment to ‘civilize’ the so-called inferior and savage territories thanks to our infinite military, economic and technical superiority. Even if it is taken for granted, it is important to remember that, for about a century, European civilization has been denominated ‘western’ because it includes North America, i.e. the USA and Canada, as Rudyard Kipling suggested in 1898 with his famous hymn ‘The White Man’s Burden’. For this reason, the western hemisphere claims the prerogative of signalling to the rest of the world the universal general way of the history of the Earth, as the German philosopher Hegel envisioned. This universal modernity, characterized by oppression, mortification and falsehood, constitutes the major effective ideology of us Europeans, who are involved in the allegedly supreme mission to civilize primitive man and to bring the human race under our command, thus ignoring the spes naturalis. From this ‘universal’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ western thought derive two conceptually disastrous myths aiming to spread a global ideology: (1) the conviction of exporting democracy in underdeveloped countries, which are deemed dangerous and terrorist; and (2) the idea of the integration-cultivation of the immigrants who live in Europe (but integration into what?). I hope that readers will be open to consider my suggestion of a global cosmo-vision of the European civilization, so that they will be better equipped to interpret our present human condition, based upon the principle of injustice.

The migrant writers in Europe are in the frontline when it comes to helping us to decolonize ourselves from the colonist that is within us, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it in 1961. At the time, Sartre introduced us Europeans to the most important book about decolonization: The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, a Martinique-born francophone psychiatrist of African New World descent who then worked in Algeria. No European philosophers after Sartre have treated modernity in this light. Earlier writers, such as Montaigne, Giordano Bruno and Shakespeare, set the tone for an important and insightful European mindset when they took a stand against the colonialism of their own time and questioned the dynamic of the encounter between the European invaders of the Americas and the so-called ‘naïve’ savages. They were conceived of as ‘half-devil and half child’, a term used by Shakespeare when he introduced the character of Caliban, the demi-devil of the Tempest. I emphasize the word ‘half’ because three centuries after Shakespeare the term was evoked once again by Kipling. All this should make us understand how European civilization today is still not able to truly scrutinize itself, and cannot question its own colonial permanence in the world and its own leadership role in perpetrating exploitation and injustice for over five centuries. This tendency is visible specifically in our day if we observe the neoliberal global economic model. I still believe that Montaigne was the only one who explicitly and secularly cast doubt on our ‘discovery’ of the so-called cannibals in the New World. Shakespeare’s Caliban curses the white usurper using the latter’s tongue, the way he was taught.

Since 1990, female and male migrant authors who live in Europe have been writing in various European languages, adopting the tongue of their ‘host’ country. By doing so, they invite us to start thinking more globally and reciprocally. We Europeans have become the ‘lackland’, without the world, ‘bearers of cold’ as Thomas Bernhard writes. Only female and male migrant authors – and there are more female than male authors nowadays – are able to make us think in this way through their literary art that ‘translates’ a new European Renaissance for our age.

However, female and male migrant authors act from a position of ‘weak thought’, as developed by the Italian postmodern philosopher Gianni Vattimo. I think this expresses itself in two very different ways. The first way is found in the perception that it is not they who are inherently poor and weak, but rather it is us who are a little hard of thinking, unprepared for transcultural listening and not ready for a transformation and a transition, as Montaigne says. At best, we tolerate the presence of migrants among us. The second way this weak thought manifests itself lies in how these writers indignantly refuse the term ‘migrant writer’, which is customarily used to label them. They reject this label because, in their opinion, it condemns them to an out-and-out ‘ghettoization’, and they argue that the term was invented by the most conservative and racist literary critics. The definition of ‘migrant writer’ could indeed prevent a reader appreciating the works of migrants as simply literary works, without further qualification. It comes down to a sort of ‘right to aesthetics’.

I do not agree with them on the latter point, however. First of all, the ‘Migrant Literature’ phenomenon in Italy – and in Europe – should be approached by perceptive readers and critics with both wonder and care. The remarkable and original importance of these writers must be thoroughly examined. Years ago, I formulated the concept of an ‘Italian literature of the global migration’ – LIMM (Letteratura Italiana della Migrazione Mondiale) – which demands to be recognized first of all as a ‘component of Italian literature’. I assert that the vision of a LIMM is not only conceptually and actively shareable with these authors, but also that it does not confine them to a ghetto. On the contrary, this vision illuminates the world by employing our own common language. It is a light that kindles and takes light from other lights, as Lucretius states: ‘ita res accendent lumina rebus’ (thus one thing throws light upon others). So too all of us Europeans, migrants and natives, who now walk together towards a future that greets us. Who is leading us – it is not us, but them. Moreover, the great majority of LIMM authors to this day write starting from the global subject of the great migration, which originates from their own. Migration always fosters great transcultural relations, but may often become traumatic or a source of suffering. However, art also promotes well-being and to migrate, as I argued before, is a powerful vital human practice, ancestral and enduring, which has been in effect since the origin of our species. This present extraordinary ‘po-ethics’ ⁵ has been enduring for at least two generations and comprises the migrant, who made the journey, and the son, who is Creole and speaks and writes in Italian, tout court. So the art of writing – but also that of music and theatre – opens a path that leads to the creation of a hybrid society. Art allows us to conceive and experiment on this type of society together with the rest of the world, in spite of the backwardness of our political elites and the racism of a considerable part of our ‘civil’ society, especially in Italy.

In order to better understand the cosmovision of hope, and to enter it, we Europeans (who are the ones without hope, clinging only to the capital market and to money that we consider is the only possible human value) must open ourselves to dialogue and mutual change, so that we may favour the transition toward the transculturation of Europeans. In the middle of the 1990s, I introduced the ideal of transculturation through the concept-imagery of a spiral-shaped healthy trinity comprised of (1) decolonization, (2) creolization and (3) mondialization of our minds and lives, which has the function of turning off the central and transcendent light of the European civilization. ⁶ Lights are everywhere, writes Lucretius: so let us follow this cosmic poet.

After a quarter of a century, I am finally able to understand the pathway that leads me from the Eurocentric source of my knowledge to the transcultural concept of my life, and of my ‘po-ethics’ in action. I am grateful to my migrant author friends, because they initiated and nurtured me toward this personal transcultural path. The creed of sympathetic listening or cultural theory are not enough; only now do I understand that by exposing myself to a conversation about change, and by their friendship, I have learned to change myself. My migrant author friends presented themselves to me first, and I, without knowing it, reciprocated, opening myself to the knowledge that they carry within themselves. It was they that presented themselves to me, ensuring that I could present myself to them. So now we are capable of walking along together.

The European-Italian phenomenon of what I call LIMM, after 25 years of growing production, is a transcultural reality that has not yet been fully perceived by Italianist scholars, and much less by Italians. I have been a professor of comparative literature for 30 years, and in 1990 I stumbled across a few books by foreign migrant authors, supported by Italian writers and journalists: Immigrato, by the Tunisian Salah Methnani and Mario Fortunato; Io venditore di elefanti, by the Senegalese Pap Khouma and Oreste Pivetta. I followed, and I am continuing to follow like a travel companion those migrant writers who changed my life and the path of my life experience from a European and Western comparatist scholar to a global and transcultural scholar. As a European and Italian, I became a translated man, as Salman Rushdie puts it. Since then, my path has become the Path of Transculturation and Kindness ⁷ that led me to ‘think together with the world’ in a ‘common place.’ This is indeed what the migrants deliver to us, for them and for us, as the notable Martinique poet and essayist Édouard Glissant has taught us.

The European Transculturation is characterized by the three pathways of decolonization, Creolization, and mondialization. The financial and commercial EU with difficulty moves in a way opposite to that of transculturation. Female and male migrant authors bring with them a eutopic project and an insightful mindset: they bring them to us as well, and thus become representatives of the double language– translated men and women – of our age. Indeed, female and male migrant authors are the witnesses and bearers of the eutopic idea – which is a concept and not a principle or foundation – in order to propose a potential general mutuality and share it with us through co-evolution. There is no hate, anger, or justification for vengeance in them, but without a doubt a critical concept that can be developed together with us. Today, the young quasi-European Islamic Creoles and the young Westerners who travel to Syria or Iraq to enlist in the terrorist army of the caliphate of ISIS or of Al-Qaeda bear witness to the hate and centuries-old determination for revenge against our colonial civilization, which continues to be oppressive. This phenomenon should also make us understand how much violence, how much anger, and how much passion for revenge we have brought upon and spread around the world through modernity: a five-century world war, which is not over yet. The reasoning, and the path, of European transculturation, which is still only taking its first steps – characterized by mondialization, Creolization, and decolonization – should enable us to ‘think and act with the world’. Our postwar utopia, the EU, has evolved within the fire of business and in the misery of the unjust worldwide willpower. This has led me to believe that the EU is not worthy at all, because the current formula of all joint European nations is the faultiest way possible, divulging its imperiousness from the deceitful throne of democracy and harmony, all downtrodden.

In 1938, Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem entitled ‘To posterity’ (‘An die Nachgeborenen’) in which he asked us (his posterity) to forgive the people of his generation for not being able to build for them, so now for us, a ‘kind’ world. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, I do not wish to be forced by this world to be in that situation and ask for forgiveness to posterity for the faults of our ancestors and ourselves, here and now. As time goes by, I find this task becoming more difficult for me.