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Mar. 14 - Mar. 21, 2004 |
Italian-Canadian identity in Udine
Solidifying Friulian connection with immigrants in upcoming conference
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2004-02-15
The international conference Oltre la storia: Au-delà de l'histoire (Beyond history - Contemporary Italian-Canadian Identity) will take place in Udine on May 20 to 22. The organizers are University of Udine's Centre of Canadian Culture, the Department of Germanic and Romance Languages and Literatures of the same university, and the Association of Italian Canadian Writers. The Canadian Embassy, the Délegation du Québec and the Committee for the Development of Humanistic and Linguistic Studies have pledged their collaboration.
Some 40 Italian-Canadian cultural operators and representatives of Canada's most prestigious universities will take part in the conference and its lectures, performances, and round tables.
To mention but a few: publisher Antonio D'Alfonso, authors Gianna Patriarca, Genny Gunn, Marco Micone, Mary Di Michele, Joseph Pivato, Caterina Edwards, Kenneth Scambray, our own Angela Baldassarre (who will intervene on "Italian-Canadian Image in Canadian Cinema"), Domenic Beneventi, Michael De Carli, Giovanni Costa, and Ralph Alfonso.
They will join a large number of university professors and researchers from the Udine university and from many more, including Rome, Trieste, Milan, Bologna, Padua, and Trento in Italy; and Paris, Antwerp, Ljubliana, Debrecen, and Szeged out of it.
They feel the fascination, some say, of the Italian-Canadian cultural identity. Judging from the premises of this conference, this phenomenon does not concern Canada and Italy alone. If so many academic institutions, from neither country, are studying it, then it has truly acquired international resonance.
Udine has been chosen as the ideal location for this conference for several reasons. First of all, the Centre of Canadian Culture is among Italy's most active; second, this region did away with the rhetoric about emigration, approaching it with a pragmatic approach.
Emigrating for centuries, Friulians managed to identify and exploit the resources hidden in their peregrinations. They overcame the purely emotional aspects, a constant in every Diaspora, to valorize the exchange of experiences, and the enrichment this entails.
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