Multicultural Little Italy: A Literary Comparison of Canadian and US Urban Enclaves

Drawing on Paul Moses’ An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York’s Irish and Italians (2015), this article explores the history and literary reflection of multicultural cities. Particularly, Louisa Ermelino’s novel The Sisters Mallone (2002) challenges accepted views of certain urban enclaves as ghettos. This assumption obscures cross-cultural relations and renders superficial the term multicultural as only a mosaic of discrete cultures living together. In this respect, a comparison to official multiculturalism in Canada discusses the complex nature of identity and belonging. A unique case study is Quebec, as is reflected in the position of the trilingual writer and the affiliation to world literature. This article is divided into two parts. Firstly, it analyzes a literary text that looks at US ethnic relations beyond conflict and segregation. The second part, using Italian/Canadian literary history, reflects on Canada as a multicultural country characterized by cultural diversity yet where cultural difference entails unequal power relationships such as regarding migrants and migrant literature.

Photography and the Concept of Return: A Personal View

As a photographer of the immigrant experience, the yearning for return to a homeland has been a central theme of my research. In this paper, I explore both my personal and collective experience of displacement and uprooting (Not Paved with Gold), the annual return to Canada of temporary migrant farm workers from Mexico and the Caribbean (Harvest Pilgrims), and the metaphorical return of Italian immigrants to a spiritual homeland through the annual re-enactment of the Via Crucis on the streets of Toronto’s Little Italy (Ritual). The paper poses the question of whether the immigrant, having abandoned his homeland, can truly return to it.

Elegies and Genealogies of Place: Spatial Belonging in the Italian/American Culture and Literature

This article examines the poetics and politics of place in Italian/American culture and in Tina De Rosa’s novel Paper Fish (1980), particularly its portrayal of ‘elegies and genealogies of place’, an appropriate framework through which to read the importance of spatial belonging. It investigates the way in which cultural identity is mostly built on both imagined communities and imagined places, as is common in migrant and diasporic cultures, through the evocation or creation of ancestors and the homeland. In addition, the Italian/American community leaves the characteristic Little Italy enclaves or undergoes displacement due to urban renewal projects and the move to the suburbs in the mid-twentieth century, which is sometimes compared to a second migration or diaspora. As a consequence, former urban enclaves come to assume a centrality as lostsanctuaries, which is captured in the trope of the Old Neighbourhood. The article contributes to existing contemporary research on the binomial placeidentity by tracing how key events of US urban history impacted on Italian/American culture. Furthermore, the goal is to offer new critical readings of Paper Fish through the focus on place-making.

Branding Cosmopolitanism and Place Making in Saint Laurent Boulevard, Montreal

The boulevard Saint-Laurent is the embodiment in Montreal of the gap between the French-speaking eastern part and the English-speaking areas in the west part, but it is also the place where immigrants settled during the twentieth century, thus creating specific neighborhoods (Little Italy, Chinatown, and Portuguese and Jewish sectors). These neighborhoods, that once symbolized poverty and marginalized communities, have been undergoing processes of both social and urban change as well as gentrification. They are now repositioned, through the urban planning, marketing strategies, and cultural events (celebrations, festivals, urban tours) produced by public and private stakeholders, as places to visit. Cosmopolitanism is being integrated as a marketing strategy to promote places and to redefine districts as destinations of leisure and tourism (Shaw S, Bagwell S, Karmowska J, Urban Studies 41(10), 1983–2000, 2004). The boulevard is a lever for branding strategies: “ethnic” neighborhoods clearly highlight the assets of cosmopolitanism through food, shops, associations or symbols such as colors, flags or ornaments. This chapter focuses on these actions of branding and the use of the cosmopolitan past of the street and their impact on the representations of pedestrians, inhabitants and users.

The Transnational Biography of ‘British’ Place: Local and Global Stories in the Built Environment

Jennifer Burns examines how diasporic communities create a presence in space that exceeds the duration and the physical locality of the community’s material residence in a given place. Observing the spaces of the everyday in a community in the UK identified as bearing Italian heritage – London’s ‘Little Italy’ – her chapter explores how traces of Italianness are present in the fabric of the built environment and how they make meaning in relation to the area’s ‘Italian’ past. The chapter offers first a close reading of architectural features and usage in the present, and then places this into dialogue with the narrative practices of observer–residents from within the historic community, contained in textual and photographic life histories.

Little Italy, Big Japan: Patterns of Continuity and Displacement among Italian Writers in Japan

Chapter 3 fast forwards to the post-war years and the period of reconstruction, which featured rapid economic growth in both Italy and Japan. The chapter considers the writings of Fosco Maraini, Goffredo Parise, Alberto Moravia and Italo Calvino through the ideological framework of continuity and change that was widely debated in Japan at the time of its rapid modernization. The chapter main argument is that the perceived Japanese model of societal evolution, based on a relation of continuity with the country’s past and tradition, played a central role in the writing of Italians traveling to Japan in this period by virtue of generating a contrast with the Italian model of evolution, which was predicated upon rupture and displacement. The conclusion of the chapter advances the hypothesis of a neo-exotic wave of interest toward Japan, predicated upon post-Marxist intellectuals’ quest for areas of the world that (unlike Europe) had not yet fallen under the ideological and cultural dominion of the Cold War’s bipolar order.