No. 24 (2026): Iconotexts. Words and Images in Migrant Literature

The essays collected in this issue explore the iconotext as an intermedial device in which word and image do not merely coexist but enter into a dynamic relationship of reciprocal semantic determination. Starting from the awareness that the migratory experience entails an identity rupture — loss of language, memory, and roots — the contributions examine how such a condition is translated into verbo-visual practices structured through montage, ellipsis, archive and counter-archive, paratextual thresholds, and the materiality of the page. Intermediality thus emerges not as an ornamental strategy, but as an epistemological resource capable of interrogating regimes of visibility and contemporary forms of memory.
Through the analysis of graphic memoirs, phototexts, wordless narratives, illustrated editions, and editorial practices, the volume outlines a thematic constellation that brings autobiography, testimony, and the construction of the self into dialogue, showing how displacement also operates as a formal principle. A further line of inquiry addresses archives and the politics of the gaze, highlighting the ethical and postcolonial implications of the photographic document and the counter-narrative strategies that redefine its use. Particular attention is devoted to the material devices of the work — supports, layout, rhythm, paratexts — and to the pragmatic effects generated by the interaction between codes. Taken together, the essays propose a “double-entry” reading methodology that combines formal analysis with historical and cultural inquiry, positioning migrant literature as a privileged observatory for understanding contemporary transformations of the verbo-visual imaginary.