An Interview with Gianluca Agostinelli (original) (raw)
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" Introduction" VIA's Italian Diaspora Studies, VIA Fall 2016, eds. E. Federici and F. Gardaphé
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During the 1970s and the 1980s, Italian Canadian Literature in English represented a thriving field of literary expression in Canadian culture. The first generation of writers narrated the trauma of displacement while shaping the cultural basis of Italian Canadiana and its place within contemporary Canadian literature. In the last twenty years, the new generations of writers of Italian origin have reinterpreted and questioned the label of ethnic literature; the constellations of literary tropes and attachments that represented the first wave of Italian Canadian literature is a spectral presence to be reinterpreted within contemporary Canadian fiction. Miche!le Alfano, Ucia Canton and Terry Favro reinterpret Italian Canadiana in transcultural terms by retaining the spectral presence of the ancestral culture. I argue that the transcultural spaces of their narratives write a dialogue between the past and the present through spectrality and affects; it also shows how they have overcome the h•auma of dislocation and it evidentiates their identification with Canadian culture.
Italian Mothers and Italian-Canadian Daughters: Using Language to Negotiate the Politics of Gender
Genealogy
This paper examines how migration redefines family narratives and dynamics. Through a parallel between the mother and the mother tongue, I unravel the emotional, linguistic, social, and ideological connotations of the mother–daughter relationship, which I define as a ‘condensed narrative about origin and identity’. This definition refers to the fact that the daughter’s biological, affective, linguistic, and socio-cultural identity grounds in the mother. The mother–daughter tie also has a gendered dimension, which opens up interesting gateways into the female condition. Taking this assumption as a starting point, I examine how migration, impacting on the mother–daughter relationship, can redefine gender roles and challenge models of femininity, which are culturally, socially, geographically, and linguistically embedded. I investigate this aspect from a linguistic perspective, through a reading of a corpus of narratives written by four Italian-Canadian writers. The movement from Italy...
1999
This i s a narrative inquiry into the experience of six second generation ltalian Canadian women teachers. An examination of these women's pluridimensional experiences will yield understanding of the dilemma faced by them in creating a sense of self amidst different sociocultural expectations and in nurturing a sense of belonging in their personal and professional knowledge landscapes (Connelly & Clandinin, 1995). To my knowledge these women will provide a voice that has never k e n heard in empirical research. As Canadian daughten of immigrants, we were socialized by our parents' regional hometown milieu which includes a dialect, a family-oriented, male-dominated, mother-centred ltalian culture of the 30s and 40s; by the Anglo-saxon mainstream school culture with i ts infusion of an individualistic, male-oriented dominant culture and the English language; by the 'distant and mythic' concept of mainstream italy (Spezzano, 1995) and its standard language; and by the I...
There is No Home to Go Back to. Life Across Boundaries: An Italian-Canadian Literary Perspective
Migrant literature is the artistic exemplification of border-crossing: from the linguistic hybridity that brings the author into breaking the boundaries between native and acquired languages, to the concoction of genres and styles which make migrant works eclectic and unique; migrant words become reminders of the struggle between home and away, a conflict that the itinerant being tries to resolve within literature. The case proposed here is that of Italian-Canadian literature, a sub-system within the multicultural mosaic of Canadian literature: the pluralization of selves, languages, and places enacted in the works by Italian migrant writers becomes symbolic of the border breaking and bridging between genres, languages and cultural experiences. In the process of writing, in their search for identity and roots, the three migrant authors analyzed occupy the space in-between home and away to finally realize that there is no home to go back to, because ‘this’ is now Home.
Italian Canadian Writing: The Difference a Few Decades Make
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Italian Canadian Writing: The Difference a Few Decades Make The article explores the changes in the last 40 years both in the language of Canadian ethnic literature itself and in its authors’ self-identifying as Italian Canadian in light of the developments of those years both in ‘identity politics’ and in Canada’s national sense of selfhood. En route it tests the usefulness of various labels used, over time, to identify these writings against the literary corpus produced for almost thirty years now by Nino Ricci, born and raised in Canada, by Italian immigrant parents. Scrittura italo-canadese: pochi decenni possono fare la differenza Il contributo analizza i cambiamenti che negli ultimi quaranta anni si sono verificati nel linguaggio, utilizzato per definire la letteratura etnica canadese, e nel modo in cui gli autori si sono identificati come italo-canadesi a fronte sia delle mutate politiche identitarie sia degli sviluppi nel senso nazionale di identita canadese, susseguitisi in...