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

This paper discusses the integration of a multimedia project involving the video editing application iMovie in an Italian course at the University of Western Australia. The use of video materials in language classrooms has a long tradition. Thanks to technological advances, video materials can now be offered to students as texts to manipulate by means of computer editing software. We report on a project designed for first-year students from the advanced stream (post high-school) which involved dubbing a five-minute sequence of a film from English into Italian using iMovie. Using results from a survey distributed online as well as written comments from students, the paper argues that the integration of an assessment task involving iMovie was a fundamentally positive learning experience. Despite initial apprehensions by students to use new software and concerns about time constraints, we show how students re-interpreted sophisticated linguistic expressions in Italian in their own way. The evaluation of the project demonstrates that the application of iMovie to language learning was a positive learning experience even when students were not familiar with the software.

During her playwriting career for professional and amateur theatre, Clotilde Masci (1918 – 1985) wrote more than one hundred plays. Her major works touched on topics which would be the focus of the rising feminist theatre: marriage as the main role offered to women in Italian society, unmarried or widowed life, separation and divorce.

The protagonist of Masci’s 1952 drama Vigilia nuziale Cristina, at nearly 30 years of age, is about to marry the son of her father’s best friend – someone she barely knows. On the eve of the wedding, however, she claims first to her family and later to the police to have stolen a ring. After the confession of the true thief proves her innocence, the play ends with a subdued Cristina who asks her relatives for forgiveness, meekly obeying her fiancé’s instructions, as the wedding preparations resume.

1952 reviewers of Vigilia nuziale were baffled by the character of Cristina, mentioning hysteria as a possible cause for her behaviour. In recent decades, women playwrights have rewritten cases of female hysterics, or have used characters of hysterical women as figures of artist’s manqué, women whose creative potential had been stifled. In my presentation, I will show that the characterisation of Cristina’s traumatic past, repressed present and threatening future, together with Masci’s choice of the profession of a medical doctor for Cristina’s fiancé, make of this play a suggestive precursor to recent works on hysteria by contemporary women authors. I will conclude that Cristina’s hysterical behaviour and her continued confession of guilt, with the foreseeable consequence of several years in jail, may be a last desperate attempt to avoid what she knows will be the confinement and suffocation of a wife, the silencing of her creative potentials.

Keywords: Clotilde Masci – hysteria – Italian women writers – Italian theatre
Mirna Cicioni

Monash University

Telescopes and Film Reels: Autobiography and Humour in three Italian Memories of Childhood in the Holocaust

I look at three autobiographical texts by Italian Jewish writers who, in their sixties, retrieved memories of their childhoods after the anti-Semitic laws of 1938. Lia Levi (born in 1931) wrote Una bambina e basta (A Little Girl and No More) in 1994; the book has not been translated into English. Aldo Zargani (born in 1933) wrote Per violino solo (For Solo Violin) in 1993; the English translation was published in 2002. Renzo Modiano (born in 1936) wrote Di razza ebraica (Of Jewish Race) in 2005; the English translation, by Susan Walker and myself, was published in 2013.

Expelled from state schools after 1938 and forced to live in hiding after the armistice of 8 September, 1943, the young narrated selves experience exclusion, isolation, dangers, constant fear for themselves and their loved ones, but also moments of human solidarity and occasional childish curiosity and playfulness. I focus on the ways the adult narrating selves look back at their young selves: the juxtaposition of the two perspectives is at times humorous and at times self-deprecatingly ironic.
Daniela Cosmini-Rose

Flinders University

Italian Civil Alien Corps in South Australia, the ‘forgotten’ enemy aliens

The period during the Second World War is remembered by the Italians in Australia as one of the hardest of their experience as migrants, owing to the restrictions that they were subjected to and to the anti-Italian sentiment that had spread throughout the nation.

On the day that Australia received news that Italy had entered the war (11 June 1940) the migrants of Italian origin were no longer just ‘aliens’ (unnaturalised foreigners) but became ‘enemy aliens’. A number of Italian migrants, both naturalised and unnaturalised, were arrested and interned on the basis of their political views, occupation and social standing. Those who were not arrested were given the option of volunteering for military service, otherwise, from 1942, they were obliged to serve in the Civil Alien Corps (CAC) to work on projects of a non-combatant nature such as construction works, salt production, cutting and handling of timber and scrub clearing.

Although numerous studies have focused on the internment of Italians, to date there has been very little research to explore the issues related to those enemy aliens who were removed from their usual occupations and loved ones to serve in the Civil Alien Corps, and were subjected to discrimination and loss of liberties.

This paper presents the findings from a study of the experiences of Italian migrants who served in the CAC in South Australia during the Second World War based on the analysis of personal archival files that contain information on the projects migrants were employed in, documentation relating to financial, medical leave, disciplinary matters and letters sent by the aliens themselves to their families, which will provide insight into the experiences of a ‘forgotten’ group of migrants during an important period of South Australian history.

Keywords: Italian Migration, Migrant Experiences, South Australian History, Enemy Aliens.

Ad un primo rapido esame della situazione del cinema Italiano nel nuovo millennio potrebbe apparire di assistere alla nascita di una nuova, anche se limitata, età dell’oro per quanto riguarda il cinema italiano declinato al femminile, l’espressione di sessualità ‘alternative’ ed identità sociali che resistano in un’epoca ‘liquida’ alla deregolamentazione e flessibilizzazione dei rapporti sociali. Il presente intervento si propone di effettuare una panoramica sui film ed i dati più significativi del cinema italiano, dal 2000 ad oggi, rispetto ai temi di genere e sessualità, illustrando, ove possibile, i progressi fatti e quelli ancora da fare.

The use of gathered wild food plants is a practice that is central to traditional plant knowledge and use in Italy (Nebel & Heinrich, 2009). In the past decade the practice of foraging has become a topic of interest in the Australian popular media. Italian-Australians appear to be key players in this social phenomenon.

The objectives are to review the practice of foraging, the gathering of wild plants, in Australia with a focus on Italian immigrants.

A review of the scientific and popular literature available on Italian-Australian immigrant use of wild food, ethnographic data, including participant observation and informal interviews, form the basis of this review.

Italian immigrants in Australia continue to gather wild food plants. While there is very little scholarly information on the traditional plant practices of Italian-Australian immigrants, there is a growing interest in traditional practices such as foraging in the popular media. Much of the information available is disseminated through the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies, which has resulted in the emergence of the ‘forager’ as social activist and educator. This is articulated as a social imperative of environmental belonging, demonstrated by engaging in the traditional cultural practice of foraging for ‘weeds’. The concern in Australia about invasive exotic species, exemplified by the Noxious Weed Act, may be at odds with the importance of accessing culturally significant plant species – often recognised as weeds – in the Italian community. This may impact on use patterns and the transmission of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). The traditional practice of gathering wild food plants, no longer an essential source of nutrients, is now a pleasurable activity, which has a growing profile as a sustainable practice.

Gathering wild plants may be viewed as an expression of cultural identity and memory. Further research is needed in order to document the traditional practices employed by Italian migrants in Australia, as an element of the investigation into the role TEK plays in the maintenance of cultural identity.

Swiss-Italian poet Giorgio Orelli (b. 1921) voices the isolated and precarious status of his Ticino homeland, a landscape that dwarfs culture into a particle of nature, pre-social, elemental. But all is not restful in this Swiss sanctuary. Orelli perceives a muted but threatening state of conflict. Hunters stalking their quarry feel their guns suddenly turned aside; rain comes over the farms like an assault; the flight of birds and butterflies seems to carry some vital message that is barely understandable. Are these signs that humanity has trespassed where it is not welcome and may soon be forced out? Or is nature sending a distress signal, appealing to the better side of a guardian that has abused and neglected it? Whatever the case, what confronts the human figures in Orelli’s poetry is a sense of wrongness, failed responsibility, distraction from matters of great importance at the edge of thought.

The alienation growing in Italian life causes such stress – work does not mean a living, institutions do not respond to citizens’ needs or beliefs, politics is a scene not of building but of tearing apart – that it may seem unwarranted to approach it in purely symbolic terms. But symbolism such as Orelli’s finds real weight as Italy confronts the ethical as well as the economic side of its crisis. Orelli’s poetry can stand as a warning of the consequences of leaving conscience adrift, of allowing the sense of isolation and exposure, the lack of responsiveness between self and setting, to be overlooked through short-sightedness. This is poetry that makes the case for an expansive, searching mentality in a reductive climate: poetry as recourse and redress.

Keywords: Poetry; Giorgio Orelli; Switzerland; Ticino; nature; alienation; symbolism; socio-economic crisis; literary study

One of the traditional courses in an Italian major, introduction to Italian literature has often been taught as a transhistorical survey of the canon, with the assistance of an anthology that provides historical and literary context (usually strictly Euro/Western-centric), summaries, excerpts, analyses and discussion questions, and texts written in a manner deemed particularly difficult for the students may be paraphrased, translated into contemporary Italian or footnoted. Students thus are led to believe that a single, correct interpretation exists, and are often discouraged thinking that their linguistic or analytical skills are simply preventing them from accessing the ‘answer’ themselves. A further consequence of this approach is the propagation of the belief that a dozen men created Italian literature, and that they did so by continuously and belatedly borrowing from both their own past as well as European trends.

This paper is part of an on-going project in the development of an introductory curriculum that allows students to engage with Italian literature in a dynamic fashion, de-emphasising a smooth historical narrative in favour of a focus on the plurality of Italian literatures. If part of an introductory class is to expose students to such names as Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Goldoni, Manzoni, Foscolo and Leopardi, I argue for the need to do so in a layered fashion: considering how an author wrote and rewrote his text, and how it was subsequently rewritten and repurposed both inside and outside Italy. Italy thus becomes a dynamic contributor to a wider literary conversation, and the Italian canon is permeated by other authors, forms, genres, media and languages.

After some brief comments/critiques on the ‘traditional’ approach to teaching Italian literature (which I intend to support with some data/input from courses taught by colleagues throughout the U.S.), I will discuss my own project with specific classroom examples, and, ideally, open the floor to a discussion about alternative approaches.

Beginning with the definition without sociological pretension of ‘belonging’ as a complex dimension of membership of community and personal identity, this paper takes a fresh look at the complex sense of belonging of a significant Italian Australian migrant worker, Francesco Giovanni Fantin (1901–42), whose life, work and untimely death at the age of 41 have attracted considerable historical attention given his assassination by fascist antagonists at Loveday Internment Camp near Barmera South Australia around 6.30pm on 16 November 1942, shortly after the Battle of El Alamein in which Australian and Italian troops participated on opposing sides. His death was a turning point in the history of wartime preventive deterrent detention of ‘enemy aliens’, the single most adverse social event in the history of the Italian community in Australia, then as now one of the largest and most significant ethnic communities in the nation. The paper charts the dimensions of community, both socioeconomic and political, which informed Fantin’s sense of working class anarchist identity from his formative years in the Schio district of the Veneto to his sense of identification with Australia on the very eve of his death.

Online chats, blogs and social media have provided second language students with more opportunity to interact in the target language. However, the way Italian Native Speaker (NS)s interact in online environments, such as Facebook (FB), is different from the way they communicate in spoken conversation. Thus, being able to understand the way Italian NSs interact on FB is important for teachers in order to explain to students how to communicate in this specific environment. This paper presents the results of one of the first studies that applies Conversation Analysis (CA) to investigate the sequential organisation of the opening posts of FB Home interactions. After describing the terminology utilised in this study, such as explaining what is the Home, a thread, a post and an opening, this paper shows that generally Italian FB users begin FB Home interactions by using a telling. Moreover, tellings which occur in the first post of a FB Home interaction are commonly autobiographical or related to a third person event. After describing what are autobiographical and third person event tellings, this paper continues to analyse the different formats of first post tellings, including textual messages, photo and hyperlink tellings as well as the combination of textual messages and photos or hyperlinks.

In conclusion, a better understanding of the way Italian NSs interact on FB might help teachers in developing new materials that may help students improve the communicative competence in the Italian language.

Keywords: Facebook, conversation analysis, openings

In the past few years, academics whose areas of study have traditionally had a national focus have had to consider how far globalisation has called into question the continued validity of that focus. In the case of Italy, since the global financial crisis of 2008–12 internal economic policy and political affairs have increasingly been shaped by European directives. Migratory flows into and through Italy from many source countries have brought with them a new tide of multiculturalism and multilingualism, which reactionary forces may deplore but are unable to stem. Information and communications technologies have brought about new forms and speeds of connectedness between Italy and the wider world. Italian products – from food to films – are redefined on global markets and new meanings are assigned to them. At the same time, a growing Italian academic and intellectual diaspora has disconnected Italian expertise and cultural belonging from residence within Italy’s borders. In this paper, I will consider some of the implications of these changes for the various fields of Italian studies, both those dealing with contemporary Italy and those concerned with earlier eras, and for the training of future specialists. What does it mean to do ‘Italian studies’ today and what is it likely to mean tomorrow?

Over the last three decades there has been an increasing number of full-length life-writing texts by and/or about Italian Australians, with an often evanescent dividing line between autobiography and biography. In fact, I am studying Italian Australian autobiographies and biographies as a single composite group. Mostly written in English, they claim citizenship within Australia as Italians. Those of the first and second migrant generations are predicated on the paradigm of a migration narrative, while those of the third or later generations articulate a rediscovery of the culture of origin.

These full-length Italian-Australian life-writing texts number at least sixty, and collectively emphasise an individualist perspective, whilst broadly sharing a common narrative paradigm. There are also at least a dozen publications each comprising a number of much shorter, predominantly oral, histories by a group of people. These few publications collectively add up to some five hundred life histories.

This area of study poses an intriguing set of problems for an Italianist as traditionally defined. Knowledge of Italian language or languages no longer seems to be crucial. A knowledge of Australian social history and social culture would appear to be more relevant. Does this area belong to Italian studies at all? Here, textual analysis veers away from literary valence to discursive valence, which is, of course, equally speculative. To the social scientist or the historian, the discursive valence of life-writing texts, speculative though this is, is likely to be as or more valuable than their highly dubious documentary valence. Experiential issues of space and place, of belonging and identity, endeavour and achievement, dominate migration and transcultural life writing.

Since 2006, Belgian-Sicilian visual artist Fabrice De Nola has been creating oil on canvas paintings with QR codes (a communication system based on universal spatial-visual symbols first pioneered by Toyota) containing texts and hyperlinks that can be read by mobile phones. In early 2009, an exhibition of De Nola’s interactive painting series, Donne di Roma (Women of Rome), was held at Rome’s Auditorium complex. The artworks review the positioning of myriad women living in Rome, offering a hopeful vision of belonging in Italy’s capital. Poised at the centre of Rome’s intercultural grassroots reality, Women of Rome unveils a techno-utopian vision in which to write and to reside, jus domicili, is to belong.

Identities in De Nola’s paintings emerge as hybrid, interstitial and multiple. Such multiplicity contests fixed conceptions of Italian-ness and jus sanguinis citizenship laws. The relational language of the spaces created by these texts works in various ways to represent new modalities of belonging that are constantly mapped anew via encounters that bring subjectivities in their particularity into being. De Nola’s artworks support such belonging by inviting viewers, whoever they might be, to play a part in their evolution. De Nola’s paintings thus affirm the existence of, and create, inclusive spaces in which no one is a foreigner: Rome appears as a dynamic site of cultural interaction in which identity remains open not solely to what is present but, also, to the coming community that is yet to emerge.

Keywords: Belonging, digital painting, intercultural, migration, potential.

L’Accademia della Crusca, nonostante un’immagine ‘polverosa’, è sempre stata all’avanguardia nell’uso della tecnologia in ambito linguistico, creando grandi corpora di lingua (come il LIR- Lessico dell’Italiano Radiofonico e il LIT-Lessico dell’Italiano Televisivo), riversando in rete il suo patrimonio documentario e librario (come le 5 ‘Impressioni’ del Vocabolario – www.lessicografia.it o l’Archivio Digitale – http://www.accademiadellacrusca.it/it/archivio/archivio-digitale) o, ancora, seguendo con attenzione il dibattito sull’uso dell’inglese come lingua esclusiva per l’alta formazione (http://www.edizionidicrusca.it/scheda.asp?idv=308) e collaborando da vicino con il mondo della scuola per esplorare i cambiamenti nell’ambito della didattica dell’italiano (http://www.accademiadellacrusca.it/it/attivita/1861). Una delle ultime mosse, dopo una presenza quasi decennale sul web tramite il sito www.accademiadellacrusca.it, è stata lo sbarco sui social network, in particolare Facebook e Twitter. Come si trova la Crusca sui social network? Quali sono gli insegnamenti che un’antica istituzione linguistica può trarre dai nuovi mezzi di comunicazione? E cosa si aspettano i ‘navigatori della Rete’ dalla Crusca? Dopo più di un anno di permanenza sui SN, siamo pronti a tracciare un bilancio di come la presenza sui ‘social’ abbia influito sulla percezione dell’Accademia della Crusca (soprattutto in Italia). Un’altra questione è quella riguardante il contenuto di tale presenza. Nel 2014, in un’epoca che Naomi Baron definisce tendenzialmente di ‘linguistic whateverism’, con una spiccata attitudine a rivolgere una scarsa attenzione alla precisione grafica e ortografica, e in un paese come l’Italia, in cui c’è una grossa percentuale di semialfabetizzati e analfabeti di ritorno e funzionali, cosa può fare la Crusca attraverso dei canali meno ‘formali’ della stampa tradizionale o delle conferenze?

Keywords: Accademia della Crusca, Twitter, Facebook, Comunicazione Mediata dal Computer, Sociolinguistica dell’Italiano Contemporaneo