Triangulations within the Italy-Canada-United States Borderlands

by Luisa Del Giudice (editor)

Literary Nonfiction. In this unique volume of essays, three Italian-Canadian-American scholars of the post-WWII diaspora, who among them span a wide expanse of geographic and cultural ground, reflect on the meaning of triangulated identities. What are the processes of translation required by personal lives, consciousness, scholarship, and modes of representation, lived in such a context? At their simplest, they must confront blended or hybridized environments, geographic, cultural, and temporal straddling, "chronic otherness," and the apparently contradictory forms of invisibility and hyper-visibility, peripherality and multi-centredness. As a basic navigational tool, cartographic "triangulation" allows these authors to explore their own personal geo-cultural positionings and to seek equipoise in an equilateral triangle. All three bring direct experience and heightened knowledge of the trans-diasporic perspective, which has left them well-prepared for the challenges of an increasingly globalized reality. Even so, such positioning does not deny an elusive sense of home and belonging; their journeys have also taught them how to feel at home in the world.

96 pages, Paperback

Published December 8, 2020

About the author

Founder and Executive Director, Dr. Luisa Del Giudice is an Independent Scholar. She was Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian Folklore, UCLA (1995-2001); has published and lectured widely on Italian and Italian American folklife, from foodways and oral expression to material culture, children's literature, and belief; and has produced many public events on Italian and Mediterranean regional and folk culture in Los Angeles, California.

Among her monographs and recordings are: Cecilia: Testi e contesti di un canto narrativo tradizionale, Brescia: Grafo, 1995; Studies in Italian American Folklore (ed.), Logan: Utah State UP, 1993; Italian Traditional Song (recordings and book), Italian Heritage Culture Foundation and the Italian Cultural Institute, Los Angeles, 1989 (2nd rev. ed., 1995); Il canto narrativo al Brallo, Varzi: Guardamagna, 1989; Canto narrativo al Brallo (recording), Milan: Albatros, 1990; “Paesi di Cuccagna and other Gastronomic Utopias,” in Imagined States: Nationalism, Utopia, and Longing in Oral Cultures (ed. by LDG and Gerald Porter), Logan: Utah State UP, 2002. Forthcoming: "Neo-Tarantismo and Folk Revival in the Salento," Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in the Mediterranean (ed. L. Del Giudice and Nancy Van Deusen). She is currently President of the Kommission für Volksdichtung (Commission pour l’étude de la chanson populaire), Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore (2000 - 2005) and a member of the SIEF Executive Board. She is committed to community education and to creating innovative public programs on the folk and regional cultures of Italians and Italian Americans.