The Transcultural Reinterpretation of Italian Canadiana in the Writings of Michelle Alfano, Licia Canton and Terri Favro

During the 1970s and the 1980s, Italian Canadian Literature in English represented a thriving field of literary expression in Canadian culture. The first generation of writers narrated the trauma of displacement while shaping the cultural basis of Italian Canadiana and its place within contemporary Canadian literature. In the last twenty years, the new generations of writers of Italian origin have reinterpreted and questioned the label of ethnic literature; the constellations of literary tropes and attachments that represented the first wave of Italian Canadian literature is a spectral presence to be reinterpreted within contemporary Canadian fiction. Michelle Alfano, Licia Canton and Terry Favro reinterpret Italian Canadiana in transcultural terms by retaining the spectral presence of the ancestral culture. I argue that the transcultural spaces of their narratives write a dialogue between the past and the present through spectrality and affects; it also shows how they have overcome the trauma of dislocation and it evidentiates their identification with Canadian culture