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This special section of Cultural Studies Review aims to read transnational spaces constructed and inhabited by Italian migrants and settlers to Australasia as emotional spaces of uncanny perceptions, memories, narratives and identities. As poignantly expressed by Ziarek, 'affect is crucial in the formation of national affiliation because it mediates between the emptiness of time and language, and the imaginary organic unity of the nation'.2 If essentialist identities seem to dominate the political discourse about the Nation, it is also apparent that beyond this rhetoric, nations are 'marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of VOLUME19 NUMBER2 SEP2013 6 contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations'.