The Migrant Experience in Italian-Canadian Writing.

This chapter deals with Italian-Canadian women writers and the multiple ways in which they tackle the trauma of migration in their works, which become sites of resistance, agency and healing. By focusing mainly on writers who immigrated to Canada as children in the 1950s and 60s (e.g., Mary Di Michele, Caterina Edwards, Genni Gunn, Gianna Patriarca, Dore Michelut, and Licia Canton), it examines how, in their endeavors to renegotiate identity within a transcultural paradigm, they devise various strategies to come to terms with their linguistic and cultural duality. These include multilingual experimentation and self-translation, crypto-ethnic metaphorical transposition, as well as a dialogic and parodic engagement with Italian culture, so as to debunk culture-bound stereotypes about Italian femininity and idealized visions of mothers and the motherland. While documenting the loss and pain caused by the migratory experience and the hardships of settlement in Canada, they add a gender perspective to the Italian-Canadian diaspora which re-inscribes the role of women as both preservers and transmitters of Italian cultural traditions and agents of change. Indeed, their writing enacts a transcultural fusion of old and new cultural elements and elicits a reformulation of ethnic identity as a hybrid, fluid and intersubjective space in which to accommodate plural modes of being and belonging and to reimagine notions of home and nation in transnational and cosmopolitan terms.