Frammenti di Rabbia

A COLLECTIVE ACCOUNT OF ITALIAN YOUTH PRECARIOUSNESS IN LA RABBIA

Abstract

One of the distinctive elements characterizing younger Italian generations is the overwhelming sense of job insecurity and existential precariousness. The lack of economic certainties and the impasse deriving from 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 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), which in eight stories voices the main anxieties of the so-called "precarious generation". Analyzing the artistic legacy of the 1977 Countercultural 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 fragmentation and uncertainty of present times, and second on how underground comics employ their artistic freedom and  formal complexity problematize the tension between collective and individual forms of enunciation.