Abstract
The landscape of greater Toronto is dotted with Italian ethnoregional community centres constructed with financial and diplomatic help from Italian regional governments. These eth noregional centres are physical representations of Italian Canadi anness and used by Italian Canadians to create meaningful spaces, to generate collective sentiment and locate themselves in the land of immigration. The ethnographic examples used in this paper, I suggest, require us to consider how to locate the ideas of flow and deterritorialization in recent anthropological work through local realities. Italian immigrants and their descendants participate in diasporic discourses and practices to construct physical places of identification to make their sentiment material and reterritorialize their identity. Further, these sites shed light on the way states alter their activities to adapt to the movement of people, money and ideas across borders. The Italian national and regional govern ments and levels of the Canadian state respond to the challenges of transnationality by practicing a kind of governmentality, a flexi ble sovereignty through the support of these projects. As such these projects help to organize the behaviour and identity of Ital ians living overseas. that locate the ideas of flow and deterritorialization in recent anthropological work within the lived experiences of Italian immigrants and their descendants living in Toronto, Canada. Italian immigrants and their descendants negotiate identity in locally specific circumstances in the greater Toronto area within the context of state-sponsored multi culturalism in Canada and multiple diasporic discourses linking peoples in Italy and Canada. A central means of expressing this complex constellation of identities is through the construction of physical places of identification. I argue we need to pay closer attention to the reterritorial ization and materialization of identity and culture to refocus
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