AustLit

This paper examines the narration of diasporic experiences by writers of Italian descent. It investigates the ways in which relationships between ‘home’ and ‘destination’ cultures are negotiated across the generations. Narratives by three women writers, Rosa Cappiello, Anna Maria Dell’oso and Melina Marchetta are analysed to show how negotiating the tensions between nostalgia for the past and the needs of the present transforms and translates notions of ‘home’ for writers who are living ‘in between’ cultures. Through a reading of the narratives of these three authors, each representative of a different generation, the paper considers the ways in which space, place and identity interact in determining the politics of belonging. It is argued that the role of the hyphenate writer has changed over the decades and across generations, from that of a raconteur of what took place, a role that may lean more toward nostalgia than analysis, to that of cultural mediator and, more recently, cultural examiner. Further, the texts chosen for analysis reveal a distinctive strategy of representation – a rhetoric of location – in which spatiality functions as a symbolic conduit between the plotting of identity constructions and Italian/Australian realities. [Author's abstract]