Triangulations within the Italy-Canada-United States Borderlands - Robert Viscusi Essay

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.