This dissertation looks at recent Italian postcolonial fiction by women (1988-2009) as a means to interrogate global communities. Emerging after an unprecedented influx of immigrants to Italy, and almost sixty years after the dissolution of Italy’s colonial empire, this literature presents a postcolonial perspective mediating both a neglected colonial past and the cultural pluralism of contemporary Italian localities in the wake of globalization. This dual focus complicates our understanding of global culture through a postcolonial perspective rooted in the Italian-East African encounter. I contend that reaching the global through the specificity of postcolonial literatures gives a sharper snapshot and deeper cross-section of minority communities of difference beyond a national politics of affiliation. More specifically I look at the recent novels of Erminia Dell’Oro, Igiaba Scego and Cristina Ali Farah, and the ways in which their texts, both postcolonial and feminist in scope, become processes of the social imaginary that perceive community through difference.