Abstract, name, affiliation and paper title acis conference 4-6 December 2013 Karen Agutter University of Adelaide Italian Migrant Hostel Experiences

Over 300,000 Italians arrived in Australia after the Second World War. While the majority arrived as unassisted migrants, or under the sponsorship of family and paesani, many came with assistance, either as post-war refugees, or under the assisted passage schemes which operated from 1952. These assisted immigrants were often housed in Migrant Hostels, Reception and Training Centres, Work Camps and business operated Single Men’s Quarters such as those run by BHP. Although the uprisings at Bonegilla, Matraville and Villawood have been well documented the Italian Immigrant experience of the ‘hostel system’ is less well known.

Like many other migrants of this period the Italian experiences varied across time and across hostels. For many assisted migrants, including Italians, periods of unemployment and forced mobility for work created hardships, uncertainty and forced separation. For many, the hostel experience was an alien one, with food and aspects of communal living difficult and unfamiliar. Furthermore, the reception of Italians by other nationalities within the hostel system, particularly the British assisted immigrants, was often hostile and in 1952 the British Migrants Association went as far as to demand separate hostels or at least physical and structural segregation within hostels, to prevent exposure to foreigners, particularly Italians.

Although Italian single men, single women and family groups formed an important percentage of hostel residents across Australia, their hostel experiences, particularly outside of Bonegilla, are little known. This paper will use archival documents and oral histories to consider the broader Italian immigrant experiences within the Australian post-war hostel system.

Keywords: Italian Migration, Migrant Hostels, Migrant Experiences, Migrant Reception
Simona Albanese

University of Southern Queensland

Italian masterpieces in Australia: is there still space for them?

Italian artworks in Australia were catalogued for the first time almost twenty-five years ago by Peter Tomory and Robert Gaston, who compiled for the first time a summary inventory of The European paintings before 1800 in Australian and New Zealand Public Collections (1989), and later by Ursula Hoff, who wrote a further catalogue of European Painting and Sculpture before 1800 (1973 and 1995 eds).

Plenty has been written since then on these works, especially in the last ten years. Considerable attention has been given to Giovan Battista Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra by the critics and by art historian Jayne Anderson, who has written a book on this painting: Tiepolo’s Cleopatra (2003).

[…] In this paper I will investigate the possible relationship between these artworks and the anonymous Italian migrants. Did they know about the existence of these Italian masterpieces? Did they ever visit the National Gallery of Victoria? Could these pictures have provided a reminder of the achievements of the culture they had left behind, a parallel for the risks they had taken in leaving Italy, and the satisfaction of knowing how highly valued those achievements were in Australia?

Keywords: art, paintings, migration, Banquet of Cleopatra, Giovan Battista Tiepolo
Louise Baird

Flinders University

‘La zona di sé’ and the epistolary form: comparing two novels of Natalia Ginzberg

In her last two novels Ginzburg changed her literary style and form, choosing the epistolary mode. Caro Michele (1973) is mostly written in the form of letters, interspersed with two sections of dialogue and a few pages of third person narrative. La città e la casa (1984) is entirely composed of letters. Her choice of this epistolary mode is dictated by her intense preoccupation with the inner life of her characters, ‘dentro di noi,’ accompanied by a growing dislike of authorial third person narrative. The change of mode evident in these last two novels is the more dramatic when compared with her previous novel, Le voci della sera.

In earlier fiction Ginzburg particularly favoured the first person voice. Now she finds in her last two novels a way to depict more fully, with much greater range, the interiors of human consciousness, what goes on ‘dentro di sé.’ She preserves the sense of first person narrative but covers a plurality of personal voices without having to use third person or omniscient narrative.

The epistolary method is brilliantly used by Ginzburg as a means to expose the workings and failings of human consciousness in the plot of life. The paper’s title comes from a comment made by one of the characters: ‘Ognuno di noi è sbandato e balordo in una zona di sé.’

Dante’s Commedia, as well as his lesser known works, has managed to captivate audiences from various countries for over 700 years. Can the same be said today, particularly in a university context?

This paper argues that:

• 
  far from being an outmoded social, political, religious and literary commentary, Dante’s discussion of such issues as migration, wealth and religion raises interesting points for analysis today;
  
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  reflecting not just on the mistakes of the past, but on previous pedagogies and epistemologies can be a useful means to contextualise current thinking; and
  
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  lastly, the representation of Dante’s Commedia across the centuries offers not just fresh insight into the poem itself but the similarities and differences in interpretations offered in various periods can provide insight into the times themselves. Just in the past 120 years, the first cantica of the Commedia was made into Italy’s first ever feature film in 1911, the Inferno turned into a videogame, complete with Dante-pilgrim as Templar Knight and, most recently, Dan Brown utilises Botticelli’s map of the Dantean underworld in his latest novel Inferno.
  

Keywords: Relevancy, reconceptualisation, reinterpretation, diverse media

How much do we really know about the history of the ‘Ndrangheta in Australia, now the most powerful and most globalised of the three southern Italian Mafias (Dickie, 2013), and the only one of these organisations known to be active in this country?

The known history of the ‘Ndrangheta in Australia begins in Far North Queensland in the 1930s, but the organisation most recently came to public attention in 2011, when Italian police unsuccessfully sought the extradition of the Calabrian former mayor of Perth’s City of Stirling on Mafia charges.

As in Italy, the Australian ‘Ndrangheta has proved adept at cultivating local politicians, and has also benefited at times from bogus appeals to an Australian multiculturalist discourse. The assassinations of Donald Mackay in 1977 and AFP Deputy Commissioner Colin Winchester in 1989, together with the television series Underbelly, have made the Calabrian Mafia a staple of local journalism and media, yet there has been a paucity of detailed and serious scholarly research on the Australian ‘Ndrangheta. Local journalistic and police investigation of the phenomenon has sometimes suffered from a lack of knowledge of the Italian language, or an appreciation of the organisation’s wider Italian and global context, with senior Australian law enforcement officers at times even questioning the existence of an Australian ‘Ndrangheta as a corporate entity. While Italian and international researchers have recently been producing important insights into the nature of the ‘Ndrangheta (Dickie, 2011, 2013; Ciconte & Macri 2009; Sergi, 2012; Varese, 2006; Spagnolo, 2010), their efforts to research its history and activities in Australia are hampered by geographical distance.

This paper assesses the value of these two geographically separate bodies of knowledge, and the prospect of bringing them into dialogue through Professor John Dickie’s proposal to establish a transnational research network on the Australian ‘Ndrangheta.
Stefano Bona

Flinders University

Italian filmmakers in China: translocal cinema and the changing perception of another culture

In a globalised world, the interactions between cultures previously unknown to each other are increasingly creating new challenges and opportunities.

China is one of the main protagonists of the world economy, and its rise has stunned the world. How has its perception changed in countries that used to be in an economically leading position no more than a few years ago? Having had connections with China since the time of the ancient Roman Empire, Italy may provide a symbolic point of view. Moreover, since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, Italian filmmakers were the first Western directors allowed to shoot feature documentaries and films in that country. Hence, the previous question may turn into: ‘How have Italian filmmakers represented China?’.

From Carlo Lizzani in 1957 to Dario Baldi in 2012, seven Italian directors have made internationally distributed films in China. If films cannot be used as historical documents, they still can convey the director’s perception of China when they were made. Thus, the analysis and comparison of these translocal films allow us to understand how the visual perception of the People’s Republic of China has shifted from that of an idyllic and isolated society to that of a modern society characterised by inequality and increasing internationalisation, and to what degree this change has impacted on Italian society.

The main tendency characterising the evolution of the vernacular in Lombardy during the late Middle Ages is the formation of a koinè. Lepschy has noted that written language in Milan during the Quattrocento was determined by a variety of traditions, including Latin and latinising elements, literary Tuscan and Northern Italian (literary Lombard in particular). In recent years, there has been ongoing debate surrounding the role which Milan played in the formation of the koinè. Lurati, for example, suggests Milan provided a centralising force for the ‘Milanisation’ of the other Lombard vernaculars, similar to what occurred for Piedmont and the Veneto. On the other hand, Massariello Merzagora suggests that the linguistic history of Lombardy does not revolve around Milan. Sanga has provided a synthesis of both viewpoints and suggests that Milan oriented the development of other Lombard dialects, both through its spread of the koinè padana antica, as well as through the spread of an Italian model mediated by Milanese over a long period. The problem of convergence – a historical process by which languages in contact become more similar in structure – has so far received little attention throughout the literature on Milan’s role in the formation of the Lombard koinè. This paper considers the correspondence of suor Elisabetta of Pavia to show that convergence had begun even earlier than what has currently been suggested in the literature.

This paper explores the recent introduction of a new course structure at UWA, called New Courses, and the impact this structure has had on first- and second-year enrolments in Italian. We begin by briefly discussing the new degree structure in general before looking at some overall trends on how it has impacted language enrolments at UWA, and in Italian in particular. Using data from enrolment numbers in past years and a survey we created, we will show how a large percentage of students studying Italian at UWA are not from the Faculty of Arts, how this new degree structure has impacted on our student cohort and what this implies for language teaching. The paper considers how New Courses has impacted on students’ choices when deciding on a major, retention rates and what implications the new structure has for teaching about Italian culture. Overall, we conclude that Italian is an attractive choice for students from all Faculties and point to areas of further research.

This paper presents the findings from a study of the Italian phonological process of Raddoppiamento Sintattico (RS) – namely, the doubling of the first consonant of a word. RS was first documented by Renaissance philologists and has received much attention from grammarians and phonologists ever since, especially over the last thirty years. However, important questions remain unresolved – for example, regarding RS’s regional distribution and whether it applies only within specific syntactic environments.

This paper presents a new look at the criteria governing the occurrence of RS, on the basis of a study performed on data taken from CLIPS (Corpora e Lessici dell'Italiano Parlato e Scritto), a corpus of spoken Italian. The study confirms certain well-documented findings – such as that RS is typically triggered by the preceding word having final stress or being one of a number of other trigger words. However, it also identifies that (i) RS occurs in the speech of some northern Italians, challenging the majority of previous literature; (ii) the likelihood of a word undergoing RS is influenced by the stress of the word itself; and most importantly, (iii) RS occurs more frequently within commonly collocated expressions – and most frequently of all within idiomatic constructions.

The paper argues that this latter finding largely explains previous (heavily contested) observations that RS can apply only within given syntactic environments. The paper explains briefly the broader linguistic implications of the patterns of RS occurrence– providing evidence in favour of detailed lexical storage, and in favour of a usage-based approach to phonology, such as Exemplar Theory.

Keywords: Linguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, Raddoppiamento Sintattico
Liz Campbell

Flinders University

Inferno XXVII: a study of deception, self-deception and wilful blindness

Canto XXVII of Dante’s Inferno is often paired with Canto XXVI, since both deal, inter alia, with aspects of fraudulent counsel. Scholars, have, however, devoted greater attention to Canto XXVI, dealing as it does with the great mythic figure of Ulysses.

The purpose of my talk will be to highlight the importance of Dante’s Inferno XXVII because it concerns the manipulation by the powerful, in the person of Pope Boniface VIII, of those with a weak moral compass, which, in this case, is the all-too-human figure of Guido da Montefeltro, and the justification claimed by those of a weak moral compass for acceding to unethical demands. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate Dante’s understanding of human psychology, his use of irony and his dramatic portrayal of wilful blindness.

Montefeltro’s prevarications in his account of his encounter with Boniface finds a modern echo in, for example, the behaviour of high-powered executives who, in their appearance before the Leveson Inquiry into the abuse of power by the Press, exhibited wilful blindness regarding phone hacking and the ensuing cover-up.

Guido da Montefeltro is a tragi-comic figure whose dilemma is vividly depicted in a way that remains as fresh and as relevant to the twenty-first century as it was almost seven hundred years ago.

Keywords: Dante; Inferno; Canto XVIII: Guido da Montefeltro; Pope Boniface VIII; deception, self-deception, wilful blindness.

Overcoming the trauma of uprooting was a common preoccupation of earlier immigrant fiction which still recurs. In post 2000 fictions and narratives written by Italians of immigrant extraction – we take as our focus Kaha Mohamed Aden’s Fra-Intendimenti and Igiaba Scego’s writing – there is a critical comparison of the different cultures and generational values and the claim for new spaces and new subjectivities, along the lines of the nomadic figuration and flexible citizenship proposed by Rosi Braidotti. The literary domains are closely linked with the historical and political domains and the theoretical approach adopted: Braidotti’s figurations of ‘nomadic subjectivity’ and ‘nomadic ethics’. In a seemingly similar vein, Somali-born author Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s most recent book draws on the idea of nomadism and bears the title Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010). Rather than opening up the ways in which identity is imagined as Braidotti is interested in doing, however, Hirsi Ali reinforces Samuel Huntington’s famous Clash of Civilizations thesis which theorises, in particular, incompatibilities between the monotheistic religions.

Adens’ and Scego’s, Fra-Intendimenti and La mia casa è dove sono, also published in 2010, are similarly preoccupied with how we imagine identity. The idea that home is where one finds oneself presents a departure from Huntington’s paradigm which extends nationalistic tropes of blood ties that are evident in Italian jus sanguinis citizenship laws, where to be Italian, one must have Italian blood. To be at home, in Aden’s and Scego’s work, means to accept that one’s identity is produced as much by one’s heritage as it is by one’s trajectory. This idea has been explored across multicultural and postcolonial bodies of literature over the past few decades. Aden’s and Scego’s positioning as Italian Somali writers within a context of a nation that has neglected to acknowledge its colonial past speaks to and with this literature.

Keywords: G2 Italian literature, belonging, sustainability, nomadic subjectivity

Drawing on Braidotti’s philosophical concepts of nomadic subjectivity and sustainability, this paper proposes a perception of 21st century literature as ‘nomad’, in need of a ‘nomadic’ aesthetics and perception of poetics. Elitist canons appear anachronistic in the ever fluctuating, often virtual, 21st century, ‘aerial’ rather than territorial, cultural space in which literature is one of many practices imagining and generating cultural spaces, inclusive of a multitude of texts made up of disparate enunciations (Fiorentino 2011). The proposition of a ‘nomadic’ literature intentionally confuses any already challenged notions of fixed canons and national literatures.

The literary texts considered, produced astride the two centuries, which, unlike earlier texts [that] used syntax ‘to cry out’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 26), uses syntax to escape encaging definitions (‘minor’, ‘migrant’). It focuses on global themes, intersecting the individual and the collective, the local and the global in their complex narratives leaping into geographies and histories beyond Italian national borders, with women often being protagonists as authors. Engaged in literary and political globalism, these writers strive for a ‘nomadic’ subjectivity. No longer just collective or political, or autobiographical, their literature has escaped easy labelling and strict definitions.

Using several ‘nomad’ texts, the case will be made that this recent literature, often considered ‘minor’ in the negative sense, provides the opportunity to ‘reverse racist discourses and turn contamination and otherness into a language and literature of innovation and change’ (Carroli 2010) by including texts able to reflect and express Italy's global society and a literary globalism. Can literature once more help build Italian unity from difference, and, this time, with difference?

Keywords: Italian literature, nomadic subjectivity, migration
Joshua Carter

University of Melbourne

Narratives of Trauma in Igiaba Scego’s Oltre Babilonia

The novels of author Igiaba Scego examine the relationship between trauma and language. The author’s second novel Oltre Babilonia follows the lives of two sets of mother and daughter (Miranda and Mar, and Zuhra and Maryam) connected via their relationship to an absent father and husband Elias. These two interlocking stories focus primarily on the younger protagonist’s difficulties integrating into Italian society. Both daughters are not without their own problems: Zuhra suffers from the sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of her high school professor, and Mar must come to terms with the loss of both her unborn child and her partner Patricia. However, each daughter’s personal trauma is exacerbated by the historical and cultural legacies of their parents, a concept which Marianne Hirshe termed post-memory¹. As life-stories are presented genealogically violence is intertwined with identity and continues to affect family members long after events have occurred.

The two stories of mother and daughter illustrate that inter-generational trauma is transmitted through language. In Oltre Babilonia trauma is presented as a gendered experience. While both sexes were equally subjected to the violence trauma arguably forms the basis of female subjectivity in the text. The cultural significance attributed to the mother-tongue ensures that personal histories are conveyed from mother to daughter in their native language. Furthermore, in being first-generation migrants and women the stories of both mothers are predominantly confined to the family and are expressed in the language of the private sphere rather than Italian, disallowing memories from entering into the cultural frameworks of their new country. Scego places the onus on her protagonists to trace trauma back to its origin in order to illustrate that their troubles are not distinct from the past, though rather represent a continuation of it.

Keywords: Igiaba Scego, intergenerational trauma, post-memory, gender.