This dissertation investigates Italian national identity through the cultures produced by twentieth-century migrations to English-speaking North America. It addresses questions of human mobility and related identity crises and practices of resistance in texts that belong to and expand the framework of Italian Studies. My project adopts the interdisciplinary model of "moving thresholds," a spatial metaphor of crossing relying on anthropological, geographical, philosophical, and sociological theorizations of space and liminality. This condition of being on the threshold - as embodied by the ambiguous spaces that migrants inhabit - challenges essentialist notions of Italian national identity and encourages a dynamic and transnational approach to borders. I focus on multiple literary manifestations of liminality (geographical, ethnic, racial, generational, cultural) and on the writing space as a site of crossings. Five autobiographical and fictional novels, a memoir, and a film, produced in different geo-cultural contexts, are read as interconnected elements of a transnational network within which they participate in a boundary-breaking operation of migration and identity. Centered on Italy, U.S. and Canada as places of departure and arrival, these texts raise issues of identity relevant to the current status of Italy as a receiving nation. As such, this dissertation considers emigration and immigration, infrequently tied together in the analysis of Italian identity, as connected phenomena. Chapter 1 investigates the poetics of suspension that Italian Jewish author Ebe Cagli Seidenberg elaborated in a series of little-known novels that she wrote after leaving Rome due to the 1938 racial laws. In Chapter 2, through Frank G. Paci's works, I explore generational liminality and the challenge of re-tracing cultural traditions for Italian migrants' children in post-World War II Canada. In Chapter 3, I turn to Kym Ragusa's memoir to examine racial liminality and the author's project of cultural bridging between two Southern diasporas originating in the Mediterranean. I conclude with Amelio's Lamerica to reflect on the shifting role of Italy in current global migrations, and self-reflexively, on the writing space of my dissertation, which, by crossing disciplinary boundaries, suggests new approaches to migration in the humanities.
Ferraro, Eveljn,
"Moving Thresholds: Liminal Writing in the Italian Diaspora"
(2010).
Italian Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0H41PPQ
