Volume 38, Number 2, Fall 2024 Domestic Goods: Silence Speaks in Our Objects, Clothing, Keepsakes, and Interiors Guest-edited by Roberta Iannacito-Provenzano and Lorella Di Cintio

EN:

This article examines, through a long series of interviews carried out mostly within the Italian diaspora of the Waterloo region of southwestern Ontario yet virtually applicable to the rest of the country, the salient characteristics diasporic domestic objects display vis-à-vis their privileged interlocutors, their family custodians. Supported by an array of theoretical views on the object per se, the study intends to explore more fully both the symbolic valence and the identity charge palpable objects of diaspora, often of domestic nature, might have retained for their custodians. It aims to probe and identify the sense and silence of these objects as they continue to engage in dialogue with their Italian-Canadian keepers, particularly those who, while continuing to live in Canada, have maintained through generations a strong sense of their Italian roots.

IT:

L’articolo analizza un racconto di Antonio Barolini scritto originariamente negli anni ’50, quando l’autore viveva negli Stati Uniti. Nel saggio, sviluppo un’intuizione di Eugenio Montale, secondo il quale il racconto – ripubblicato in italiano nel 1968 – delineava la “biografia di un baule.” Nella mia lettura, il “baule” di Barolini è la metafora d’una memoria stratificata di tempi storici, identità sociali, e appartenenze geografiche. Da questo punto di vista, il racconto di Barolini mette in dubbio, da un lato, l’idea che l’identità culturale sia legata a un possesso individuale, di una persona o di una nazione. Esso, dall’altro lato, evidenzia che i sentimenti connessi al ricordo delle radici e all’appartenenza sono ambivalenti, talvolta conflittuali. L’articolo sostiene che la prosa di Barolini testimonia di come solo il dialogo, il contatto e lo scambio possano rendere ragione della difficile “verità dei sentimenti.”

EN:

The article analyzes a short story originally written by Antonio Barolini in the 1950s, when the author was used to live in the US. In my essay, I develop a line of argument out of an insight provided by Eugenio Montale. For Montale, Barolini’s short story – republished in Italian in 1968 – was about the “biography of a little trunk.” In my reading, the “little trunk” (bauletto) is a metaphor for a multi-layered memory of different historical times, social identities, and geographical belongings. From this point of view, Barolini’s short story challenges the idea that cultural identity is a matter of individual possession – of a person or a nation. The bauletto of Uncle Vittorio also highlights the ambivalent, at times conflictual, characterization of the feelings connected to one’s cultural roots and belonging. The article argues that Barolini’s narrative bears testimony of how dialogue, cultural contact, and exchange can account for the complexity inherent in the “truth of feelings” (verità dei sentimenti).

EN:

In this paper, I reflect on my experience of making home and homeliness as a recent Canadian and on the significance that bringing a seed or a plant into an adoptive country may have for others. I ask how this gesture may be interpreted through a pluralistic, non-anthropocentric view: how can I, a relatively recent settler, acknowledge and address the consequences and the contradictions generated from the practice of seed and plant smuggling described above? How can I become more accountable for my presence in my new adoptive home, and at the same time find ways to maintain and strengthen my identity as a symbiotic being (and not as an island) in dialogue with the land, the populations, and the cultures that host me?

EN:

This article explores the significance of eight wooden internment objects created in the Kananaskis prisoner of war camp (c. 1940–1943) and their placement after the owner/creator returned from the camp. Through an analysis of the placement of these objects in a suitcase in a dark basement corner for over forty years, the researcher can ascertain the presence of unexpressed trauma. This article reveals an inherent ambivalence felt by the creator/owner with respect to the significance of these objects. On one hand, the owner – Federico Ghislieri – wanted to forget this period of internment, as indicated by his silence, yet, surprisingly, he could not dispose of the material vestiges of his camp experience. Instead, he negotiated this by preserving them yet hiding them from view. This article reflects on this contradiction through an analysis of the work of four psychological and material cultural theorists whose work provides a framework for comprehension: Jung, Bachelard, Veyne, and Greenblatt. Together, these thinkers suggest that the placement, and displacement, of household objects demarcate an object’s perceived value, both personally and in our culture. Finally, one can gain insight into how object placement can also be a political statement, reflecting long-held anxieties about an immigrant’s safety in the new country he calls home.

EN:

This essay discusses Italy’s famous deinstitutionalization movement in the 1970s through the material culture of photography. I focus on film and photographs that provide stunning evidence of the aftermath of the closure of psychiatric hospitals in Italy. The “tearing down” of asylum walls that occurred within reform movements of the 1970s, famously led by Franco and Franca Basaglia, is analyzed by mobilizing photographs in and of Italian hospitals taken by the French photographer Raymond Depardon, whose photographs prove the failure of reform through clothes, games, and objects of restraint. Depardon’s practice offers an opportunity for understanding the habitus that drove the institutional shutter in Trieste, Collegno, and Venice.

EN:

This essay is part of a wider project of autoethnographic exploration of the memory- and place-making function that keepsake objects perform in the context of the multi-scalar and more-than-human temporalities of colonial modernity and its pervasive geographies of displacement. In it, I engage in quiet conversations with an object associated with my father’s life, illness, and death in Bari, Italy – a wooden bookstand, or leggìo, which my father made out of repurposed wood. For over twenty years, this leggìo actively interacted with my spaces of migrant dwelling, affectively modulating my discomfited sense of hyphenated belonging among urban domestic interiors in Canada – at times attenuating my internal displacements and longings and at others amplifying them. This essay converses with the strange animacy accrued by the leggìo over the decades, at first just triggering my own personal memory work, but then moving outward into more difficult and demanding ethical questions about environmental stewardship and decolonial futurity, once I start interrogating the object’s material components and their manufactured provenance.