https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6363-9552
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ABSTRACT
Claudia Durastanti belongs to a new generation of Italian writers who embrace life on the move, writing outside of the borders of Italy and living between different languages and cultures. Durastanti’s memoir, La straniera (2019), is the personal story of the writer moving between New York, Basilicata, Rome, and London. The constant code-switching due to the author’s double nationality is also entangled in the sign language spoken by Durastanti’s deaf mother. By analysing Durastanti’s linguistic coming of age through a second language and the relationship with her mother, this article aims to discuss the writer’s position as a polyglot as well as a nomadic subject. In the representation offered by Durastanti, Italian culture and language do not prevail over other languages and cultures but interact with them, contributing to the creation of a new intersectional subjectivity.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Anna Momigliano, ‘The Ferrante Effect: in Italy Women Writers are Ascendant’, The New York Times <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/books/elena-ferrante-italy-women-writers.html> [accessed 2 April 2023].
2 Momigliano.
3 Cristina Pasqualini and Alessandro Rosina, ‘La mobilità all’estero dei Millennials italiani e lo scenario post Brexit’, in Rapporto italiani nel mondo 2017, ed. by Delfina Licata (Todi: Editrice Tau, 2017), pp. 138–46.
4 Francesco Carlucci, ‘La Grande Crisi e i suoi effetti sull’Europa’, Rivista di Studi Politici Internazionali, 78 (2011), pp. 489–518 (p. 507).
5 Sergio Fabbrini, ‘Tecnici al governo e governi tecnici: alcune riflessioni comparative sull’Italia’, Ventunesimo Secolo, 14 (2015), pp. 65–79 (p. 66).
6 Carlucci, p. 508.
7 Tiziana de Rogatis, Homing/Ritrovarsi: Traumi e translinguismi delle migrazioni in Morante, Hoffman, Kristof, Scego e Lahiri (Siena: Edizioni Università per Stranieri di Siena, 2023), pp. 57–61.
8 Viola Di Grado, Settanta acrilico trenta lana (Roma: Edizioni e/o, 2011), p. 12.
9 Viola Di Grado, Fame Blu (Rome: La nave di Teseo, 2022), p. 65.
10 Francesco Chianese, ‘“Una tragedia di linguaggio non corrisposto”: Language Between Family Crisis and Transnationalism in Viola Di Grado’s Settanta acrilico trenta lana’, Women Language Literature in Italy Donne Lingua Letteratura Italiana, iv (2022), pp. 17–30 (p. 5).
11 Claudia Bruno, Sola andata (Milan: NNE, 2022), p. 93.
12 Claudia Durastanti, La straniera (Rome: La nave di Teseo, 2019), p. 78.
13 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
14 Ibid., p. 9.
15 Ibid.
16 Luke Sunderland, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, in Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook, ed. by Jennifer Burns and Derek Duncan (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022), pp. 69–76 (p. 70).
17 Ibid.
18 Joseph Peschel, ‘Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know’, The Brooklyn Rail <https://brooklynrail.org/2022/02/books/Claudia-Durastantis-Strangers-I-Know> [accessed 10 July 2023].
19 Nancy L. Green, ‘Expatriation, Expatriates, and Expats: The American Transformation of a Concept’, The American Historical Review, 11.2 (2009), pp. 307–28 (p. 327).
20 de Rogatis, Homing/Ritrovarsi, p. 4.
21 Durastanti, p. 20.
22 Durastanti, p. 75.
23 Durastanti, p. 82.
24 Christine DeLucia, ‘Negotiating the Hyphen: An Evolving Definition of Italian-American Identity’, Italian Americana, 22.2 (2004), pp. 201–07 (p. 202).
25 Durastanti, p. 109.
26 Durastanti.
27 Durastanti, 48–49.
28 Italo Calvino, Il castello dei destini incrociati (Milano: Mondadori, 1994), p. VI. See also Maria Vittoria Pugliese, ‘Il fragile potere della scrittura: “Il castello dei destini incrociati” di Italo Calvino’, Italianistica: Rivista di letteratura italiana, 37.1 (2008), pp. 101–09.
29 Durastanti, p. 11.
30 Durastanti, p. 12.
31 Durastanti, p. 14.
32 Aleida Assman, ‘Transformations Between History and Memory’, Social Research, 75.1 (2008), pp. 49–72 (p. 50).
33 Patrizia Sambuco, Corpi e Linguaggi: Il legame figlia-madre nelle scrittrici italiane del Novecento (Padova: Il Poligrafo, 2014).
34 Sambuco, p. 18.
35 Durastanti, p. 215.
36 Sambuco, p. 37.
37 Durastanti, p. 41.
38 Durastanti, pp. 211–12.
39 Durastanti, p. 197.
40 Durastanti, p. 68.
41 Durastanti.
42 Durastanti, pp. 30–31.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Durastanti, p. 50.
46 Ibid., p. 197.
47 Durastanti, p. 211.
48 Ibid., p. 213.
49 Ibid., p. 212.
50 de Rogatis, Homing/Ritrovarsi, p. 148.
51 Durastanti, p. 5.
52 Ibid., p. 284.
53 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, pp. 44–45.
54 Rosi Braidotti, Fuori sede: Vita allegra di una femminista nomade (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2021), p. 6.
55 Francesco Chianese, ‘Claudia Durastanti ci racconta La straniera’, L’indiependente <https://www.lindiependente.it/claudia-durastanti-la-straniera-intervista/> [accessed 2 April 2023].
56 Durastanti, p. 19.
57 Durastanti, p. 65.
58 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 128–40.
59 Outside the context of representation of transnational Italian youth, for an accurate and insightful analysis of female subjectivity in the mother-daughter dynamic, see Katrin Wehling-Giorgi, ‘“Ero separata da me”: Memory, Selfhood and Mother-Tongue in Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante’, in Goliarda Sapienza in Context: Intertextual Relationships with Italian and European Culture, ed. by Alberica Bazzoni, Emma Bond, and Katrin Madison Wehling-Giorgi (New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016), pp. 215–30.
60 Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 127.
61 Durastanti, p. 283.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 Tiziana de Rogatis, ‘Ripensare l’eredità delle madri. Cerimoniale iniziatico e strutture rituali ne L’amore molesto, I giorni dell’abbandono e La figlia oscura di Elena Ferrante’, in Nel nome della madre, ed. by Daniela Brogi, Tiziana de Rogatis and others (Roma: Del Vecchio Editore, 2017), pp. 74–95 (p. 77).
65 For analysis of the maternal relationship in Goliarda Sapienza’s work see Katrin Wehling-Giorgi, ‘Dislocazioni materne: memoria, linguaggio e identità femminile nelle opere di Goliarda Sapienza’, Nel nome della madre, pp. 147–61.
66 de Rogatis, Homing/Ritrovarsi, p. 160.
67 Ibid., p. 6.
68 Durastanti, p. 65.
69 Durastanti, p. 285.
70 Alistair Thomson, ‘Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History’, The Oral History Review, 34.1 (2007), pp. 49–70 (pp. 53–54).
71 Patrick O’Farrell, ‘Oral History: Facts and Fiction’, Oral History Australia Journal, 5 (1982–83), pp. 3–24 (pp. 3–9).