This book examines the concept of translation as a return to origins and as restitution of lost narratives, and is based on the idea of diaspora as a term that depicts the longing to return home and the imaginary reconstructions and reconstitutions of home by migrants and translators. The author analyses a corpus made up of novels and a memoir by Italian-Canadian writers Mary Melfi, Nino Ricci and Frank Paci, examining the theme of return both within the writing itself and also in the discourse surrounding the translations of these works into Italian. These ‘reconstructions’ are analysed through the lens of translation, and more specifically through the notion of written code-switching, understood here as a fictional tool which symbolizes the translational movements between different points of view. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of translation and interpreting, migration studies, and Italian and diasporic writing.

After World War II, hundreds of thousands of Italians emigrated to Toronto. This book describes their labour, business, social and cultural history as they settled in their new home. It addresses fundamental issues that impacted both them and the city, including ethnic economic niching, unionization, urban proletarianization and migrants' entrepreneurship. In addressing these issues the book focuses on the role played by a specific economic sector in enabling immigrants to find their place in their new host society. More specifically, this study looks at the residential sector of the construction industry that, between the 1950s and the 1970s, represented a typical economic ethnic niche for newly arrived Italians. In fact, tens of thousands of Italian men found work in this sector as labourers, bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers and cement finishers, while hundreds of others became contractors, subcontractors or small employers in the same industry. This book is about these real people. It gives voice to a community formed both by entrepreneurial subcontractors who created companies out of nothing and a large group of exploited workers who fought successfully for their rights. In this book you will find stories of inventiveness and hope as well as of oppression and despair. The purpose is to offer an original approach to issues arising from the economic and social history of twentieth-century mass migrations.

Drawing out her mother's childhood memories of life in southern Italy at the dawn of the twentieth century, Mary Melfi takes an unconventional approach to autobiographical writing. Italy Revisited serves as a double memoir, told in dialogue between a mother and a daughter. The conversation takes the reader to a medieval town high up in the mountains where time is told by the shadow the sun casts, where wheat and olive oil are the currency of choice (barter is in use), and where marriage is as much about property as it is about love. As they re-create that vanished world, the pair finds greater understanding of the tumultuous relationships that sometimes exist between immigrant mothers and their children.

Through a historical and economic analysis of Italian Canadian migration in the second half of the 20th century and through the study of Italian and Canadian archival sources, this book provides an analytic and in-depth tool for the study of the economic and cultural relations between Italy and Canada, from the Golden Age until the present. It focuses, in particular, on the analysis of migratory flows between the two countries, on the evolution of integration, work and assistance problems, and on the promotion of Italian-Canadian culture. The book also retraces the evolution of some relevant non-profit organizations and their role in the enhancement of Italian-Canadian cultural heritage.

Italians came to Canada to seek a better life. From the 1870s to the 1920s they arrived in large numbers and found work mainly in mining, railway building, forestry, construction, and farming. As time passed, many used their skills to set up successful small businesses, often in Little Italy districts in cities like Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, and Winnipeg. Many struggled with the language and culture in Canada, but their children became part of the Canadian mix. When Canada declared war on Italy on June 10, 1940, the government used the War Measures Act to label all Italian citizens over the age of eighteen as enemy aliens. Those who had received Canadian citizenship after 1922 were also deemed enemy aliens. Immediately, the RCMP began making arrests. Men, young and old, and a few women were taken from their homes, offices, or social clubs without warning. In all, about 700 were imprisoned in internment camps, mainly in Ontario and New Brunswick. The impact of this internment was felt immediately by families who lost husbands and fathers, but the effects would live on for decades. Eventually, pressure from the Italian Canadian community led Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to issue an apology for the internment and to admit that it was wrong. Using historical photographs, paintings, documents, and first-person narratives, this book offers a full account of this little-known episode in Canadian history.

Scholarship on Italian emigration has generally omitted the Julian-Dalmatians, a group of Italians from Istria and Dalmatia, two regions that, in the wake of World War Two, were ceded by Italy to Yugoslavia as part of its war reparations to that country. Though Italians by language culture, and traditions, it seems that this group has been conveniently excised from history. And yet, Julian-Dalmatians constitute an important element in twentieth-century Italian history and represent a unique aspect of both Italian culture and emigration. This ground-breaking collection of articles from an international team of scholars opens the discussion on these "forgotten Italians" by briefly reviewing the history of their diaspora and then by examining the literary and artistic works they produced as immigrants to Canada. Forgotten Italians offers new insights into such celebrated authors as Diego Bastianutti, Mario Duliani, Caterina Edwards, and Gianni Angelo Grohovaz, as well as visual artists such as Vittorio Fiorucci and Silvia Pecota. Profoundly marked by the experience of being uprooted and forced into exile, by life in refugee camps, and by the encounter with a new culture, first-generation Julian-Dalmatians in Canada used art and writing to come to terms with their anguished situation and to rediscover their cultural roots.