The Routledge History of Italian Americans (original) (raw)
Related papers
The melting pot and beyond: Italian Americans in the year 2000
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.
After Identity: Migration, Critique, Italian American Culture
AFTER IDENTITY, 2017
Among the aims of this collection there is the attempt at a critical reconfiguration of the rhetoric of identity, and the first attempt slowly to construct a conceptual map which would characterize Italian American culture in terms of newer, multilayered and broader categories. Some of the key terms/concepts discussed in these pages that the reader will encounter are: belonging and membership, polycentric consciousness, mediascapes, forms of translation, hybridity, strategic marginality, inventions of the past and the defusing of nationalistic mythologies. Permeating these perspectives is the question of the migrant and the relevance of migration in general in shaping cultural identities or specific communities. Indeed, it will be argued that migration is the starting point, but by definition an unstable entity, not quite an axiom...As some of the earlier chapters make patent, not enough reflection has been focused on the question of how someone – especially if an artist, or a writer, or a public persona — can identify as being both, an American and an Italian, without confronting the thus revealed possibility that identity is a construct of multiple elements, all critically slippery, all historically contingent and multipronged, and perhaps constituting, deploying a post-modern moniker, a plurality of discourses in constant conflict and exchange. Identity has no contours, it is fluid, amoebic, viscous.
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.
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.
" Introduction" VIA's Italian Diaspora Studies, VIA Fall 2016, eds. E. Federici and F. Gardaphé
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