Entanglements: Emplaced, Transnational and Transcultural Trajectories in Life-Writing by Italian-Australian Women

Abstract In this study, I explore how engaging with autobiographical writings by Italian-Australian women has allowed me to reflect on my own emplaced, transnational and transcultural trajectory. Through a combination of archival research, textual analysis and personal narrative, I trace my encounter with a rich, though often overlooked, corpus of autobiographical writings that emerged in community contexts – particularly through literary contests organized by the National Italian-Australian Women’s Association – which resulted in the publication of two books of short stories: Give Me Strength (1989) and Growing up Italian in Australia (1993). Drawing on concepts such as ‘locational feminism’ and ‘transduction’, particularly as examined by Jasmina Lukić (2023), I consider how these texts speak across time and place, and how they resonate with my own experience as a scholar, writer and Italian-Australian woman and mother. I analyse these stories in search not of a fixed historical truth, but of what Nina Lykke foregrounds as ‘poetic truth’: a form of knowing that reverberates across subjectivities in the form of a resonance. This essay merges creative and academic writing and is grounded in a desire to read, share and amplify the vibrant, collective voices of translingual and migrant women.