This article aims to explore the agency of the migrant to speak in the destination culture through an examination of the way in which first-generation autobiographies are introduced. It will compare Italian American autobiographies produced at the beginning of the twentieth century with African Italian autobiographies penned in the early 1990s, arguing that striking similarities between the respective literary forms of the texts, and the political climates in which they were produced, prompt an exploration of whether factors such as class, gender and the act of literary collaboration with an established cultural figure hold shifting or static values in permitting the migrant's voice to be heard.
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