Italian items in domestic spaces
Representing Italianness through objects in the fiction of Helen Barolini and Chiara Barzini
In their migration, people carry objects with them, and relocate them through physical spaces and across cultural
boundaries. Handed down through generations, these objects become signs of ethnicity beyond their appearance and purpose.
Examining the variety of the literary representations of objects and their subsequent translation contributes to the analysis of
how material culture migrates within distant cultural systems and from one language to another. This essay focuses on domestic
objects depicted by two Italian authors writing about the experience of a migrant coming-of-age in the United States: Helen
Barolini and Chiara Barzini. Using diverse multilingual and (self-)translation strategies, they highlight through cultural
translation the difficulties of bridging their Italian and American selfhood within an Italian household relocated abroad. In
doing so, their relationship with objects underlines how their diasporic experience is entangled with their achievement of
self-confidence and independence as women within the context of the Italian diaspora.
Article outline
- Introduction: Seeking the Italian diasporic self within the house
- Objects as vehicles of belonging or not belonging: From American houses to Italian homes
- Artifacts crossing the bilingual ocean in Umbertina: When “coperta” turns into a bedspread
- To self-translate or not to self-translate: Uncanny items in Barzini’s American kitchen
- Conclusion: Being objective through objects?
- Acknowledgements
- Note
-
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