Transcultural Narrative Identities

This is the first study on the development of Italian ethnic identity in North America (United States and Canada) from a gender perspective and based on memoir. It argues for a thoughtful reexamination of an emerging genre in contemporary autobiographical writing which is particularly apt for narrating the experiences of women and ethnic minorities.

This book aims to create a new space for the analysis of female experience in the Italian diaspora through a selected sample of representative writers in contemporary Anglophone literature. In addition, it presents memoir writing as a fertile ground for literary and cultural research and as an important framework for expanding paradigms of identity in our increasingly diverse societies. This innovative study focuses on intersectional memoirs texts written from the perspective of ethnic women. It examines the formation of narratives of identity in contemporary writing, particularly looking at the expression of cultural and gender difference through the genre of memoir and within the US and Canadian contexts. The work of migrant and ethnic communities and marginalized voices situated at the boundaries of nations, cultures, social classes and genders, is examined through a blend of literary, feminist, racial and cultural memory theories supported by textual analysis.

Autorentext

Eva Pelayo SanÞudo holds a PhD in Gender and Diversity from the University of Oviedo and currently teaches at the University of Cantabria (Spain). Her research fields include American literature, ethnic studies and gender studies. Her monograph Spatialities in Italian*American Women's Literature: Beyond the Mean Streets*(2021) has received several awards.

María Pilar Rodríguez is Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Deusto. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and has published extensively in the fields of literature, film, culture and gender studies. She is the Principal Investigator of the Basque Government's communication research team.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments Preface Pilar Rodríguez Pérez/Eva Pelayo Sañudo: Introduction. Theoretical Considerations: Memoir, Gender, Intersectional and Transcultural Perspectives Eva Pelayo Sañudo: "And I will Pass On, Too, Stories": Matrilineal Legacies and Cultural Context in Louise DeSalvo's Elegiac Memoirs Vertigo (1996) and Crazy in the Kitchen: Family, Feud, and Forgiveness (2004) Eva Pelayo Sañudo: Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Hybrid Forms of the Bildungsroman Through Diane Di Prima's Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969) and Recollections of My Life as a Woman (2001) Eva Pelayo Sañudo: Space, Emotion, and Gender: Mapping Transcultural Identity in Kym Ragusa's The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging (2006) Eva Pelayo Sañudo: The Wellspring of Nostalgia: Memory, Identity and Trauma in Caterina Edwards' Finding Rosa: A Mother with Alzheimer, a Daughter in Search of the Past (2008) Pilar Rodríguez Pérez: A Maternal Memoir: Transmemory, Transgenerational Storytelling and Transculturality in Mary Melfi's Italy Revisited: Conversations with My Mother (2009) Pilar Rodríguez Pérez: The Road to Now: Recollecting the Ethnic Quest in Penny Petrone's Breaking the Mould (1995) and Embracing Serafina (2000).