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
-
References
References (56)
References
Aronin, Larissa and Muiris O. Laoire. 2013. “The
material culture of multilingualism: Moving beyond the linguistic landscape.” International
Journal of
Multilingualism 10(3): 225–235.
Bachmann-Medick, Doris. 2009. “1+1=3?
Intercultural relations as a ‘third space.’” In Translation
Studies, ed. by Mona Baker, 31–45. London: Routledge.
Baldo, Michela. 2019. Italian-Canadian
Narratives of Return: Analyzing Cultural Translation in Diasporic
Writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Barolini, Helen. 1985. The
Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian-American
Women. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Barolini, Helen. 1997. Chiaroscuro:
Essays of Identity. New York: Bordighera Press.
Barolini, Helen. 1999. Umbertina. New York: The Feminist Press.
Bartoloni, Paolo. 2016. Objects
in Italian Life and Culture: Fiction, Migration, and Artificiality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Barzini, Chiara. 2017a. Things
that Happened before the Earthquake. New York: Doubleday.
Barzini, Chiara. 2017b. Terremoto. Trans.
by Chiara Barzini and Francesco Pacifico. Milan: Mondadori.
Berardi, Claudia, Francesca Calamita, and Daniele de Feo, eds. 2020. Food
and Women in Italian Literature, Culture and Society. New York: Bloomsbury.
Bona, Mary Jo. 1999. By the Breath of Their Mouths:
Narratives of Resistance in Italian America. New York, NY: SUNY Press.
Burdett, Charles, Nick Havely, and Loredana Polezzi. 2020. “The
transnational/translational in Italian Studies.” Italian
Studies 75(2): 223–236.
Burdett, Charles and Loredana Polezzi. 2020. “Introduction.” In Transnational
Italian Studies, ed. by Charles Burdett and Loredana Polezzi, 1–22. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Burdett, Charles, Loredana Polezzi, and Barbara Spadaro. 2020. “Introduction:
Transcultural Italies.” In Transcultural Italies: Mobility, Memory
and Translation, ed. by Charles Burdett, Loredana Polezzi, and Barbara Spadaro, 1–22. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Burns, Jennifer. 2018. “Mapping
transnational subjecthood: Space, affects and relationality in recent transnational Italian
fictions.” California Italian
Studies 8(2): 1–17.
Burns, Jennifer. 2020. “The
transnational biography of ‘British’ place: Local and global stories in the built
environment.” In Transcultural Italies: Mobility, Memory and
Translation, ed. by Charles Burdett, Loredana Polezzi, and Barbara Spadaro, 23–46. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Basu, Paul and Simon Coleman. 2008. “Introduction:
Migrant worlds, material
cultures.” Mobilities 3(3): 313–30.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.
Ciribuco, Andrea. 2019. The
Autobiography of a Language: Emanuel Carnevali’s Italian/American Writing. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Ciribuco, Andrea. 2020. “How
do you say kélén-kélén in Italian? Migration, landscape and untranslatable food.” Translation
Studies 13(1): 99–115.
Clifford, James. 1997. Routes:
Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Daniels, Rhiannon, Anne O’Connor, and Katherine Tycz. 2020. “Italian
material cultures.” Italian
Studies: 75(2): 155–75.
Dickie, John. 1996. “Imagined
Italies.” In Italian Cultural Studies: An
Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Donato, Clorinda. 2021. “Forging
transnational identities in Italian American chick lit: The novels of Adriana Trigiani and the ethnic
Bildungsroman.” Diasporic Italy: Journal of the Italian American Studies
Association 11: 59–83.
Kellman, Steven G. 2000. The Translingual
Imagination. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Fischer, Michael M. J. 1986. “Ethnicity and the
post-modern arts of memory.” In Writing
Culture, ed. by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 194–233. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Gabaccia, Donna. 2000. Italy’s
Many Diasporas. London: UCL Press.
Gabaccia, Donna, and Franca Iacovetta. 2002. Women,
Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the
World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Ganeri, Margherita. 2015. Italian
America: Epos and Storytelling in Helen
Barolini. Havertown: David Brown Book Company.
Gardaphé, Fred. 1992. “My
house is not your house: Jerre Mangione and Italian-American
autobiography.” In Multicultural Autobiography: American
Lives, ed. by James Robert Payne, 139–177. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.
Gardaphé, Fred. 1996. Italian
Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gardaphé, Fred. 2016. “Beyond
the immigrant paradigm: New Italian American identities and communities.” RSA
Journal 271: 131–149.
Garzone, Giuliana. 2017. “Food,
culture, language and translation.” Journal of Multicultural
Discourses 12(3): 214–21.
Giunta, Edvige. 1999. “Afterword:
An immigrant
tapestry.” In Umbertina, 425–53.
Orlando, Francesco. 1993. Gli
oggetti desueti nelle immagini della
letteratura. Turin: Einaudi.
Polezzi, Loredana. 2012. “Translation
and migration.” Translation
Studies 5(3): 345–356.
Polezzi, Loredana. 2015. “Migrant
writing as (self-)translation: The transnational trajectory of Giose
Rimanelli.” In Destination Italy: Representing Migration in
Contemporary Media and Narrative, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Emma Bond and Federico Faloppa, 303–322. Bern: Peter Lang.
Polezzi, Loredana. 2020. “Translation
and transnational creative practices in Italian
culture.” In Transnational Italian Studies, ed.
by Charles Burdett and Loredana Polezzi, 25–46. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Radstone, Susannah. 2020. “The
lost clock: Remembering and translating enigmatic messages from migrant
objects.” In Translating Worlds: Migration, Memory, and
Culture, ed. by Susannah Radstone and Rita Wilson, 13–26. London: Routledge.
Recalcati, Massimo. 2007. Il
miracolo della forma: Per un’estetica
psicanalitica. Milan: Bruno Mondadori.
Ros i Solé, Cristina. 2020. “Lived
languages: Ordinary collections and multilingual repertoires.” International Journal of
Multilingualism, 0(0): 1–17.
Ruberto, Laura and Joseph Sciorra. 2017. “Introduction:
Rebooting Italian America.” In New Italian Migrations to the United
States, Vol. 2: Art and Culture Since
1945, 1–31. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Sciorra, Joseph and Edvige Giunta (eds). 2014. Embroidered
Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
Sollors, Werner. 1987. Beyond
Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American
Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tamburri, Anthony J. 1991. To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate: The
Italian/American Writer: An Other
American. Montreal: Guernica.
Tamburri, Anthony J. 1998. A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In
(Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer. New York, NY: SUNY Press.
Tamburri, Anthony J. 2003. “Beyond ‘pizza’ and ‘nonna’! Or,
what’s bad about Italian/American
criticism?” Melus 28(3): 149–174.
Vanni, Ilaria. 2020. “Misplaced plants: Migrant gardens and transculturation.” In Transcultural Italies, ed. by Charles Burdett, Loredana Polezzi, and Barbara Spadaro. 253–274. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Viscusi, Robert. 2006. Buried
Caesars and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing. Albany, NY: State University of New York.
Verdicchio, Pasquale. 2016. Bound
by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora. New York: Bordighera Press.
Walsh Hokenson, Jan and Marcela Munson. 2007. The
Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary
Self-Translation. London: Routledge.
Wang, Cangbai. 2016. “Introduction:
The ‘material turn’ in migrant studies.’” Modern Language
Open 261: 1–11.
Wilson, Rita. 2007. “Cultural
(re)locations: Narratives by contemporary Italian Australian
women.” In Literary and Social Diasporas: An Italian Australian
perspective, ed. by Gaetano Rando and Gerry Turcotte, 147–166. Brussels: Peter Lang.
Wilson, Rita. 2012. “Parallel
creations. Between self-translation and the translation of the
self.” In Creative Constrains: Translation and
Authorship, ed. by Rita Wilson and Leah Gerber, 47–66. Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Press.
Wilson, Rita. 2020. “Writing
the neighborhood: Literary representations of language, space and mobility.” Transcultural
Italies, ed. by Charles Burdett, Loredana Polezzi, and Barbara Spadaro. 297–316. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Wolf, Michaela. 2012. “Cultural
translation as a model of migration?” Tranlatio/n: Narration, Media and the Staging of
Differences, ed. by Federico Italiano and Michael Rössner, 69–88. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Ciribuco, Andrea
2023.
Multilingualism and activism in Italian studies.
Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies 57:2
► pp. 451 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.