The Status of Interpretation in Italian American Studies

tribute to the discourse on Italian Diaspora studies. We have chosen five essays for this venture with the hope of enabling our readers to begin to see what happens when we juxtapose essays on the Italian experience in different parts of the world. What you will find are similarities as well as differences that mark the importance of exposure to a wider range of studies of the Italian migrant cultures. With this issue, we hope to join those who are pushing both Italian and American studies in new directions that result in creating transnational perspectives that transcend the typical mono-cultural readings of single national experiences, and this will be accomplished not through the writings here, but through your readings of what we present. Early in their careers many Italian/American scholars spent much time studying the different cultures that make up the USA. They studied the African American, Jewish American, Irish American, Asian American, Hispanic American experiences, and wondered, as does Spike Lee's character Mookie in the film Do the Right Thing, where were the pictures of their people on the walls of the local institutions. That's when many decided to focus their time and energy on Italian/American studies. Through articles, books, curriculum and program development they did not follow the traditional American studies path, and in doing so defied status quo expectations of what a good American Studies student would produce. Throughout these studies they learned much, but nothing more important than what they learned about two different nations and what happened when one migrated from one to the other. These were some of the most important lessons ever learned in or out of school, and they prepared them to devote their lives to developing Italian and American studies in the context of American Studies. They did this outside of school with the hopes

2018

his volume is the outcome of the conference Re-Mapping Italian America. Places, Cultures, Identities, held on May 12-13, 2016 at Roma Tre University, Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Straniere. On that occasion, we had the privilege of hosting as keynote speakers Mary Jo Bona, Fred L. Gardaphé, and Anthony Julian Tamburri, whose inspiring lectures and conversations fired up a lively exchange of views on a field of study still under-explored in many ways, especially in Italy. To our great delight, Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Tony Ardizzone generously accepted our invitation as guest writers and engaged in substantial readings from their works, while delivering captivating interviews that involved the audience and our students in a still ongoing dialogue. Filmmakers Marylou and Jerome Bongiorno were also part of this event via video-conference, sharing clips of their works-screened for the first time in Italy-and granting us a thought-provoking interview. We thank them also for providing the cover image to this book. The idea of the conference was first conceived in the spring of 2010, in the aftermath of lectures held by Fred L. Gardaphé on Italian/American literature and culture that we both attended at the Centro Studi Americani in Rome, where we met. The entire project and the present volume were made possible by the continuous involvement and support provided by Anthony Julian Tamburri and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute (Queens College, CUNY). A special "thank you" goes to Bordighera Press and to Nicholas Grosso for his editorial assistance. Among our colleagues at Roma Tre University we wish to thank Veronica Pravadelli for granting us crucial support from the Centro di Ricerca Interdipartimentale di Studi Americani (CRISA). Our gratitude also goes to Richard Ambrosini, Cristina Giorcelli, and Luca Ratti (Roma Tre University), as well as to Donatella Izzo (University of Naples "L'Orientale") and Giorgio Mariani (Sa-T "Acknowledgments" x pienza University of Rome) for chairing panels and generating intense, lively discussions with the audience. We owe a heartfelt thanks to Giuseppe Nori for his presence on behalf of the Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani (AISNA). Marina Camboni and Valerio Massimo De Angelis, in turn, kindly accepted our invitation to present the Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi ItaloAmericani (CISIA) of the University of Macerata. Invaluable technical support was provided by Claudio Mosticone and Davide Bevilacqua, while ongoing assistance was offered by the administrative staff of the Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Straniere at Roma Tre University. We wish to thank them all. Sabrina Vellucci • "Re-Mapping the Field" xxi the individual lives out his/her daily life" (Tamburri 67). Beyond all traditional geo-cultural confines, the "Italian" world Tamburri envisions "surpasses every restrictive, reductive, and essentialist conceptual barrier" (69) and includes non-Italian writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri along with other writers of the Italian diaspora, in a process of "transcultural evolution" that allows for a more profound understanding of the "transnational discourse in which Italians engage but that, from a hegemonic point of view, they do not recognize" (75). In her contribution entitled "Italian American Studies in the Italian University's System: Current and Future Perspective," Margherita Ganeri argues that introducing courses on Italian/American literature and culture in the Italian academic system would be a valuable and strategic move, especially in terms of curricula development. In order to substantiate her assertion, she illustrates the case of the successful pioneering program "Cultura e Letteratura Italiana Americana" (CLIA), established at the University of Calabria in 2014. Acknowledging the intrinsic transnational and interdisciplinary character of Italian/American Studies, Ganeri upholds the necessity of an ongoing exchange between Italy and the different countries and cultures of the Italian diaspora, not only to foster understanding of the "mobile and dynamic constructions of 'Italianità'" (Ganeri 308), but also as a way to further innovative research in Italian Studies and the humanities in general. Even more important, Ganeri asserts, "Diaspora studies have an ethical and social purpose […] to promote civilization and social progress […] on a national, but also on a transnational level" (Ganeri 317). Stefano Luconi's essay, "Military Nationalism and the Re-Elaboration of Ethnicity: Italian Americans and World War I," examines how the patriotic discourse surrounding the Great War contributed to redefining the identity of both Italian newcomers and their progeny in the United States. If, at first, the dynamics of the Italian resettlement overseas strengthened the immigrants' localis-

Italian Quarterly 23 (1982): 51–54., 1982

I am going to comment on American historiography of the Italian Renaissance. This is a subject that has always fascinated me for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that during the last twenty-five years in this country. there has been a renaissance in the historiography of the Italian Renaissance. The historical contexts in which this remarkable event has occurred is quite complex; it cannot be reduced to the arrival of great refugee scholars-Paul Oskar Kristeller, Hans Baron, Felix Gilbert and others-fleeing Europe. These scholars, to be sure, are the sine qua non of the outpouring of studies in my field, but the contextual issues remain more complex. One of the striking features of our renaissance is the relatively minor role played by Italian scholarship, especially theoretical scholarship. For the most part, American historians remain unaware of the importance of Croce and Gentile to our field, and are unaware of a good deal of contemporary Italian scholarship, for the obvious reason that this corpus of scholarship is rarely translated into English. The American publishing houses, particularly the university presses, prefer to publish the more fashionable French scholarship-the works of Fernand Braudel, Georges Duby, Jacques Le Coff, Le Roy Ladurie. Their works have been translated and recently published by the University of Chicago Press. Although American editors may be acquainted with French, they certainly do not read Italian and consequently the effort to have a major work of Italian historical scholarship translated is very time-consuming. When I recently became an editor of the Journal o[Modern History, established in 1929 (the same year, incidently, the French journal Annales was established), I read the earliest issues and, to my amazement, discovered that there had been a serious interest on the part of American historians in Italian historiography. I also discovered that Croce, whose philosophic views were misinterpreted by American historians, made, nonetheless, a deep impression on American historians such as Charles Beard and Carl Becker, and that the Neapolitan philosopher-historian was invited to speak at the meeting of the American Historical Convention at Champagne-Urbana Illinois in 1933. I also discovered that if one returns to our earlier historiography, he or she will find that, by and large, historians in the United States did not write about

2005

2021

The discussion of Italian literature and culture within Italian Studies has been for a long time restricted to the geographical boundaries of Italy itself. The last decades have shown, however, an opening towards a broader vision, especially in the context of theoretical approaches such as Postcolonialism, Cultural Translation, and TransArea Studies.Analogous to Francophone and Hispanophone Studies, Italian Studies has begun to also focus on the so-called ‘guest worker’ and Migration literature, a genre which includes not only the literature of authors who migrated to Italy, but also ‘Italian’ literature originating in countries like France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Strikingly, up until now, literature and media originating in the Italo-American context have been studied much more frequently in other fields of research, such as American and Canadian Studies, than in (European) Italian Studies. This edition of Lettere aperte’s 2nd edition will for that reason be dedicated to Italo-American Culture.

Labor: Studies in Working-class History of The Americas, 2005

2021

Remembering Italian America: Memory, Migration, Identity examines the life of Italians in the United States and the role of migration and collective memory in the history of the construction of Italian American identity. Employing the concept of communicative memory, the authors explain the processes that gave shape to Italian identity in America and the ways in which a symbolic identity became concretized in Italian American oral histories. The text explores the Italy migrants left behind, transatlantic networks, the welcome received by the Italian newcomers, the socioeconomic fabric of Italian America, and the singular worldview that grew out of the immigrant experience. In exploring the role of memory in the construction of Italian American identity, the book analyzes the commonalities in the lives of immigrants, allowing the Italian American experience to speak to the circumstances of newer immigrant communities and allowing these new immigrant communities to speak to the Italian migrant history. Looking at Italian American culture from a multidisciplinary perspective, this volume brings various theoretical perspectives to bear on "what, why, and how" questions concerning the Italian American experience. This book will be of interest to students of ethnic studies, immigration studies, and American/transnational studies, as well as American history.

But Marconi does finally relocate to Italy, roughly at the time Mussolini comes to power. And Raboy devotes the last of the book's five sections to this often neglected (or sanitized) phase of Marconi's life. Indeed, Raboy has the courage, and the archival documents, to challenge the euphemisms and silences that have marked other studies, in Italian and English, of Marconi's later life. He explores Marconi and D'Annunzio's mutual admiration, Marconi's negotiations with the Vatican (especially in relation to a desired divorce, but also around the propaganda possibilities of wireless), and his compromises with Mussolini and the Italian scientific community (chapter 31 is entitled, 'A Servant of the Regime'). Already a senator, Marconi accumulates new titles and leadership roles that can, Raboy shows, scarcely be dismissed as ceremonial. This is some of Raboy's most provocative analysis, striking only a few dissonant notes, as when he devotes several pages to the question of whether Marconi was personally anti-Semitic and might have supported the racial laws of 1938 (he instead died in 1937). The evidence seems equivocal, at least much more ambiguous than Marconi's enthusiastic embrace of racist projects in Ethiopia. But we may also be inclined to ask whether this is the right (or most pressing) question to ask. Racial sciences and legislation (in Italy as elsewhere) were, after all, more than the product of individuals' ill will toward Jews and others; they also had their roots in the bio-political logics that informed Mussolini's demographic campaign and the colonization of East Africa. Here, we might say, the projects of the historian and the biographer begin to diverge. But they never drift very far apart, and Raboy mostly resists psychologizing. In fact, it is only in the final pages of the book that the author suggests Marconi suffered from cycles of depression for much of his life, and that was something 'was missing in his emotional development ' (p.675). Perhaps an earlier mention would have encouraged another kind of neat and tidy reading of the complex life that unfolds in the pages of this wonderful book. Instead we learn to be satisfied (and very) with unresolved questions, ambiguity, contradiction, even muck.

1987

work on the continuing significance of ethnicity and race in American social and political life. (1) We felt it was important to ascertain how much Italian Americans had changed or progressed since their early settlement in the American colonies and their mass migration to the United States at the turn of the century. We also wised to consider how the character of subsequent migration has changed and in what direction Italian Americans were going. A sub-theme of the meetings was the Italians of Rhode Island, recognizing that this state has the greatest concentration of citizens who trace their roots back to Italy of any state in the union. In recognition of the outstanding achievements of Rhode Island's Italians, the first two chapters of this volume chronicle the political careers of John Pastore and Luigi De Pasquale. The stories of these two men parallel the social and political development of the states Italian American population.