‘A Rustling Sound’: Voices of WWII Italian Detainees from The Multilingual Archive of Australia

Abstract

National archives, libraries, and museums both expose and, directly or indirectly, collude with the military, legal, political, and rhetorical processes of exclusion that tend to obfuscate people’s subjectivities. In this article, official spaces assigned to preserve national memory are placed into dialogue with other archival sites of memory preservation and retrieval of family and community past. By looking at the connections between diverse documents related to Italian-speaking individuals who were prisoners of war and civilian internees in Australia, during World War II, the article investigates how this material can be used to question hegemonic discourses and counters the ‘monolingual paradigm’. Letters, diaries, and memoirs that account captivity and marginalisation during wartime offer cases of polyvocal texts as both creative and privileged sites of speech acts, discursive and material interactions where we can locate spaces of agency, connection and affect.