Twenty Years of Change: The Paradox of Italian-Canadian Writers

The most significant development which has taken place among Italian-Canadian writers since 1986 is the great amount of writing and publication. This was not supposed to happen according to most opinions. I recall that for the 1986 conference Dino Minni wanted to look at the uncertain future. Some of us had questions, or doubts, about what these authors were going to write about. Were they going to continue to talk about, and complain about the immigrant experience? So Minni made the theme of the conference “Writers in Transition,” which was a euphemism for assimilation. And I gave a paper entitled, “Nothing Left to Say.” Had Italian-Canadian writers exhausted the themes of immigration, and ethnic identity? Many of my academic friends said yes they had. Several authors agreed and planned to move on to other topics and literary problems. So it was a paradox that some of the writers used the occasion of the 1986 conference in Vancouver to found an association of writers now called the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers. This essay is a brief review of the history of AICW from 1986 to 2006

Cosmic Ear: Calabrian Writers in Canada

"Our House is in a Cosmic Ear" is the title of a poem by Antonino Mazza, a poet and translator who epitomizes Calabrian writers in Canada. Calabrians constitute a very large proportion of the Italians in Canada. There are an estimated 260,000 people of Calabrian background. Nevertheless little has been written about these people or their cultural impact on Canadian society. Calabrians in Canada are better known for their significant economic success. Many have achieved prominence in the professions. Their construction companies have changed the skylines of Toronto and Montreal. These achievements overshadow the modest endeavours of artists who are representing cultural roots and the experiences of immigration. However economic success does not always help us to understand who we are. We must turn to the artist to explore questions of identity

Problems for the Italian-Canadian Writer and Critic: A Discussion in Three Parts

Part One: The State of the Art; Part Two: Younger Writers; Part Three: The Burdens of History for the Italia

Shirt and the Happy Man: Theory and Politics in Ethnic Minority Writing

Ethnic minority writing in Canada was once a neglected field not only by Canadianists promoting a canon for a national literature, but also by theorists who focused on the great works from major European languages as the standards for explaining all the writing of the world. The recent growing interest by both groups in the works of ethnic minority writers in Canada, along with the literary awards some of these new writers have won, has created the need to review the role of theory in the re-evaluation of minority writing. This brief essay raises several questions about the relationship of high theory to ethnic minority writing. Among the topics considered are the instinctive mistrust of theory by some minority writers, the political use of theory to create a space for minority authors, postmodern ideas, intertextuality, and the use of foreign languages in English or French language texts. The issues of resistance to theory and the politics of literary production is placed in the context of the debate over the appropriation of voice, storytelling and realist traditions

Friulani Writers in Canada: Elegy for the Future

One day we got lost in Pordenone. On a long drive from Udine to Bassano we took a wrong turn and found ourselves in a newly built area of Pordenone. The streets, sidewalks, green lawns and house designs were all a reproduction of a new subdivision in Toronto. We were lost, but we were back in Canada. It was a disorienting experience. These former immigrants to Canada had returned to Friuli, but had wanted to reconstruct their Toronto neighbourhood. They wanted both worlds: to live in Friuli, but in a Canadian style, and probably with Canadian dollars. What does this tell us about our relationship to landscape and to history

Representation of Ethnicity as Problem: Essence or Construction

The reading and study of ethnic minority writing repeatedly confront the problem of representation, and raise many questions in the debate between essentialism and social construction and implications for the issues of appropriation of voice and agency. Using examples from Italian-Canadian writers and other minority groups in Canada this paper explores these questions and implications referring to the critical work of Sneja Gunew, Edward Said, Francesco Loriggio, Linda Hutcheon and Frank Lentricchia

Five–Fold Translation in the Theatre of Marco Micone

In the complex relationship between the literatures of English Canada and Quebec translation has played an important role. Now with the emergence of ethnic minority writing in Canada this binary model of the literary institutions must be reformulated. The processes of translation are made even more complex by the phenomena of heritage languages and ethnic minority cultures. How are these developments represented on stage in the French theatres of Montreal

Laser Interferometer Space Antenna

Following the selection of The Gravitational Universe by ESA, and the successful flight of LISA Pathfinder, the LISA Consortium now proposes a 4 year mission in response to ESA's call for missions for L3. The observatory will be based on three arms with six active laser links, between three identical spacecraft in a triangular formation separated by 2.5 million km. LISA is an all-sky monitor and will offer a wide view of a dynamic cosmos using Gravitational Waves as new and unique messengers to unveil The Gravitational Universe. It provides the closest ever view of the infant Universe at TeV energy scales, has known sources in the form of verification binaries in the Milky Way, and can probe the entire Universe, from its smallest scales near the horizons of black holes, all the way to cosmological scales. The LISA mission will scan the entire sky as it follows behind the Earth in its orbit, obtaining both polarisations of the Gravitational Waves simultaneously, and will measure source parameters with astrophysically relevant sensitivity in a band from below $10^{-4}\,$Hz to above $10^{-1}\,$Hz.Comment: Submitted to ESA on January 13th in response to the call for missions for the L3 slot in the Cosmic Vision Programm