Abstract
Migrants and their children are often ‘unsettled ’ from their ancestral homelands, caught between identification with one culture and another. This chapter explores the experience of in-between-ness that this kind of relationship generates. The author focuses on his own connections to Venice and the Veneto: a site in which he identifies himself as an insider/outsider—a familiar -stranger to his own past. By referring to theories of nomadism , in-between-ness and translation, it is argued that writing in situ is a creative act that connects the self to various terrains; linguistic, literary , historical, ancestral, real and imagined. In so doing, the writer enacts and embodies what can be thought of as a contemporary form of flânerie . This form of creative wandering is in turn a mechanism through which poetry is created, affording the author a method through which he maps subjectivity onto the terrain across which he roams, and a means to engage in processes of de- and re-colonisation that ‘resettle ’ the self in time and space.
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Venzo, P. (2019). The Unsettled Self. In: Pinto, S., Hannigan, S., Walker-Gibbs, B., Charlton, E. (eds) Interdisciplinary Unsettlings of Place and Space. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6729-8_2
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