bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1992) — Winter 1992 // Hiver 1992, pp. 41–42
Canadese: A Portrait of the Italian
Canadians by Kenneth Bagnell, Macmillan
of Canada, 1989, 287 pp. $27.95.
The literature on Italian-Canadians — not unlike that on many other ethnocultural minorities — has undergone in recent decades an important transition. At its early stage it was dominated by the filiopietistic genre — a type of writing that celebrates the past of the ethnic group and emphasizes the success of its most prominent members in such a way that the success of the entire ethnie would flow as a sort of logical conclusion.
During the 1970s and 1980s, as immigration and ethnic history became an important field of social history, and as young Italian- Canadian academics were attracted to this discipline, the writing on Italian immigration to Canada gradually moved into the mainstream of Canadian historical literature. Articles published in some of the leading scholarly journals, books, theses and dissertations have led to a sizeable literature on the various facets of the Italian-Canadian experience. The research agenda is growing and becoming more complex and diversified. With rare exceptions, authors are of Italian origin, academically trained as researchers, and motivated by a desire to give their ethnocultural group a history that, by meeting the scholarly standards of the historical profession would be considered credible, if not always interesting, to read.
Bagnell’s book comes as a major novelty in this historiographical landscape. As a reputed journalist who also has a passion for the topic of immigration, he has managed to apply his writing and research skills to the story of the second largest ethnocultural minority, producing a portrait of Italian- Canadians which is sympathetic in tone (without being filiopietistic), but which only partially reflects the achievements of recent scholarship.
A touch of celebration pervades the several dozen biographical portraits which fill the pages of Canadese — often portraits of individuals who are still alive and who cannot but appreciate the mostly favourable light in which the author portrays them.
This celebration, however, is far from gratuitous: in each case Bagnell is careful to reconstitute the contours of individual life trajectories and to create the sense of drama surrounding one’s immigrant experience. His fieldwork has taken him to hundreds of locations, both in Canada and Italy. What is even more striking, the language barrier has not prevented him on numerous occasions from being a participant-observer, capturing the spirit of community events, and penetrating — often with the help of an interpreter — into the daily universe of both the prominent and the humble. Tales of success emerge from virtually every chapter. But, although in immigrant literature success is all too often viewed as synonymous with material achievement, in Bagnell’s portraits the term acquires a more subtle meaning, one that conveys the moral and psychological stakes in becoming part of a society that has not always welcomed newcomers.
Readers of Canadese will also appreciate the book’s design. The narrative follows a chronological order, beginning with the massive recruitment of Italian labourers during the Laurier era and closing with the contemporary context marked by the end of the migration flow from Italy and by a solidly-rooted presence that nourishes the urban culture of many Canadian cities. Between these two terminal points, Bagnell’s narrative — always skillfully focused on life-stories — takes us through the map of Italo-Canada that gradually emerged during the interwar period, and solidified in the wake of the massive postwar arrivals. As a bridge between these two major periods of Italian immigration and settlement, the author places the drama of World War II, when hundreds of Italian-Canadians were interned for allegedly posing a threat to our national security, and the community thrown into disarray by public hostility and ostracism.
Bagnell’s multi-biographical approach renders his narrative vivid and confers on it a documentary-like character. One of its side effects, however, is the tendency to fall into the episodic and the sensational, and to miss some of the more subtle ways in which an immigrant community has now become a central component of Canadian civil society. For instance, Quebec Italians appear in the story only in connection with the activities of the disreputable padrone Antonio Cordasco (who became the leading target of a Royal Commission), or as protagonists, some sixty years later, in the Saint-Léonard school crisis when Italian parents clashed against Quebec nationalists. Granted that much of the literature on Quebec Italians is in French, it is ironic that a Canadian researcher who manages to surmount the Italian language barrier would give up so easily when confronted by French language sources. Moreover, we learn little about the different ways in which Italian men and women experienced their new Canadian life, or about the patterns of intergenerational conflict marking the daily universe of many Italian-Canadian households. Similarly, it is nice to follow the upward mobility of some Italian immigrants all the way to Parliament or to the Senate, but it would have been instructive to learn about the workings of political patronage, and the place of the Italian-Canadian community within the multiculturalist consensus that has marked our recent political landscape.
As Robert Harney and other historians have repeatedly argued, immigration and ethnicity are best understood when viewed as a process. It is this dimension of process, so central in much recent historical scholarship, that is largely missing in Bagnell’s otherwise skillful narrative. Perhaps the technical and editorial imperatives imposed by this genre of writing have prevented the author from shifting his focus more often toward the more ordinary and common aspects of the Italian-Canadian experience.
Still, Canadese constitutes a most captivating voyage into an ethnic world made up of warm, nearly heroic personalities who will be quite happy to act as hosts to interested Canadian readers.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1992) — Winter 1992 // Hiver 1992, pp. 41–42. Read the rest of this issue →
