Italians in South Africa : challenges in the representation of an Italian identity

Bibliography: leaves 72-75.Through a selection of material written by Italians in South Africa, this study aims to discuss the difficulties and challenges faced by Italian emigrant writers in representing their identity. The study places itself in the context of other studies in the field of i/emigrant, minority and ethnic studies in as much as the body of work, similarly to i/emigrant texts written in other parts of the world, has been to date considered of marginal significance or has not been examined at all. This study instead considers the opportunities of analysis that texts such as these represent and offers motivations for the need to engage with them. To analyse these texts offers the possibility to observe the relative status of the reader/critic and also to be open to the process of identity creation which does not exist in a vacuum but rather through the exchange and relations held between people of different linguistic, socio-political, historical and cultural backgrounds. With specific regard to material written by Italians in South Africa, an area in which research has up to now been fairly limited, it is argued that the tendency is for writers to emphasise a nationalistic and patriotic definition of Italian identity. This is in part as a result of the pressure emigrants face when confronted by their new cultural, linguistic and geographic setting. The tendency towards patriotic and nationalistic sentiment has also been encouraged during specific moments of Italy's history, and that is, the years leading up to Italy's unification and declaration of its nationhood status (the Risorgimento) and during fascism. The texts analysed are a letter (dated 1833) of a settler to the Cape, one Rocco Catoggio; the war time diary (published in a literary and political Italian newspaper in 1901) by a certain Camillo Ricchiardi, a volunteer and Boer sympathiser during the South African War (1889 - 1902); newspaper articles published by Italian Prisoners of War in the Zonderwater Camp during the Second World War and the biography and chronology by Adolfo G. Bini on the history of Italians in South Africa