After Identity: Migration, Critique, Italian American Culture (original) (raw)

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.