Paul Carter's Translation of Italy in Baroque Memories (1994). Layering and Multiplicity on the Construction of the Migrant

In the context of histories of cross-cultural encounter in contemporary migrant communities, my study explores the figure of the migrant in one of Paul Carter’s “translations” of Italy: namely, Baroque Memories (1994). A sustained focus of Carter’s work is the exploration of intercultural communication, as well as other kinds of engagement – notably acts of memory – that draw different cultures and languages together, with respect for diversity at their core. Such forms of engagement can generate lingua-cultural encounters and clashes that have potential to generate new beginnings, and more or less hybrid spaces and identities. Moreover, all forms of intercultural communication and interaction can create, enforce and undermine power. UK born Carter (1951-) moved to Australia from the UK in 1980, after spending a number of years in Italy. In 1994 he produced his ‘anti-novel’, Baroque Memories (Memorie barocche, Italian translation with preface by Antonio Tabucchi, 1998), a work that attempted to renarrate the mental geography of the migrant as a vortex rather than as a line. This work explores the vicissitudes of migrant identity-making through a dreamlike juxtaposition of the architectures of Brunswick (in Melbourne, Australia) and Lecce, a baroque city located south of Bari in ‘the heel’ of Italy. The act of remembering in relation to the migrant’s experience in the new country is closely explored in Baroque Memories. The title alludes to the activity of memory as a matter of inventing or creating something strangely new. One of the ideas Carter developed there is what he calls ‘the disponibilita of the migrant’; he explores the origin of cross-cultural encounter, asserting that the multi-channel communication performed by the migrant (mimetic, gestural, macaronic) recapitulates the beginning of all communication. Instead of seeing the adaptive strategy of the migrant as secondary, or reactive, Carter contended that the suspension of certainty, and the associated imperative to find common ground, recapitulated the origins of cross-cultural encounter, and, perhaps, the primary scene of communication as such.