The “Double Absence” of the Immigrant and Its Legacy across Generations among Australians of Italian Origin

Abstract

The present paper discusses the concept of “double absence” and its legacy across three generations of participants. It seeks to illustrate the impact of this cognitive condition in relation to participants’ personal, interactional, and institutional social fields. Specifically, the study attempts to frame a reflexive picture extrapolated from participants who in their narratives deliberately reported certain incidents that might have shaped, diachronically, their ethnic identity across generations. In particular, the paper focuses on how the first generation of participants manifests a condition of feeling “absent” which appears to be twofold: from the country of origin and from Australia. The second generation, in turn, appears to present a condition of liminality, originated through growing up between two worlds (the one of their immigrant parents and the Australian one). The third generation, because of a perceived positive evaluation of their ethnic background from the “dominant” society, appears to manifest their ethnic identity openly. A pivotal role seems to be played by the amount of cultural capital accumulated by individuals and their perceptions of what Gramsci would call the senso comune, the “common sense” of the dominant society, which might shape individuals’ ethnic identity: specifically, their positionality, in terms of their ethnic perceptions of “being in the world.”