Fragments of Anger

A Collective Account of Italian Youth Precariousness in “La Rabbia”

Abstract

One of the distinctive elements characterizing young Italian generations is the overwhelming sense of job insecurity and existential precariousness. The lack of economic certainties and the impasse deriving from the difficulty in projecting oneself into the future have therefore become crucial characteristics in many youth narratives. The article analyses the representation of the problematic relationship between young people and precarious work through a medium in-between two worlds, the visual and the textual: comics. The study investigates the underground collective comic La Rabbia (Einaudi, 2016), outcome of the collaboration between autoproduzione and renowned publishing house Einaudi, which in eight stories voices the main anxieties of the so-called "precarious generation". Tracing the birth of Italian autoproduzione back to the artistic legacy of the 1977 Movement, the article investigates the formal affordances of comics to express the discomfort of youth, and focuses on two aspects: first on how the peculiar fragmentary form of comics lends itself to represent the frag-mentation and uncertainty of present times, and second on how self-produced comics employ their artistic freedom and formal complexity to problematize the tension between collective and individual forms of enunciation.