Italian British Diaspora Literature and the SS Arandora Star: Countertexts of a Historical Omission

The article investigates literary and cultural silences surrounding the 1940 sinking of the SS Arandora Star, a British ship carrying Italian civilian internees that was torpedoed off the Irish coast in a U-boat attack, and the tragedy’s belated reinscription within Italian British diaspora literature and broader cultural memory. The analysis foregrounds the tension between archival silence and literary reinscription within a broader discourse of belatedness, trauma, and diasporic identity formation across Italian British writing. Through close readings of key texts, including Mary Contini’s Dear Francesca (2003) and Dear Olivia (2006), Maria Serena Balestracci’s Arandora Star: Dall’oblio alla memoria (2008), and Caterina Soffici’s Nessuno può fermarmi (2017), the article argues that these narratives deploy omission as a counter-discursive strategy to rearticulate suppressed histories of migration, internment, and loss. By transforming silence into a site of textual questioning and mnemonic reconstruction, it demonstrates how Italian British diaspora literature and cultural practice destabilise dominant national historiographies and challenge affect around memory and forgetting. The study thus situates the Arandora Star as both historical trauma and symbolic locus of cultural erasure, reframing the politics of remembrance across different narrative and scholarly genres that are increasingly aware of the complex ambivalences around strategies of omission and remembrance.