From Italy to Little Italy to Big ’merica and Beyond: Thoughts on Italian Diaspora Studies

Until we begin thinking about Italian migration in terms of diaspora, we remain stuck in the center of our own experiences, which, as I have learned, is one of many. For me, it began when I left my Italian neighborhood—filled with those Italians who never really identified with the land they had to leave and ventured into what my grandfather called, “’merica.” They lived in Little Italys. I left my little Italy every day I went to school, and came back into it to do homework, work that never validated where I had come from.For those who did not leave the neighborhood, ’merica didn't wait for them to arrive; it came to them through newspapers, radio, film and television; it came to them in schools that taught them that Italians only mattered if you wanted to talk art, music, and eventually food—once the ’mericans got a taste of pizza and spaghetti and meatballs. We learned so little of the Italy our grandparents had left that we began to think it didn't matter where we came from; what was important was where we were going.For a long time, the Italian immigrant experience was not considered American, and so it was not something studied by the Italian scholars who had come to study American literature in the United States. Like me, their proximity to the experience kept them from seeing it as something that might be explored in formal educational settings. Many had relatives who had emigrated from Italy, and the very idea of studying something personal in a public setting, at least back then, was not something we did in school settings. As the multicultural movement began to take hold and gain power in the US academy attention went to the ethnic and racial groups that were involved politically: political action is required for cultural attention in the US, especially in a capital-based economy. Turning revolutions into trends makes it salable and enhances opportunities for the agitators to sell out; turning volatile rap songs into bestsellers is simply capitalism's way of defusing challenges to its grip on social and political power. If the mainstream, whether in the commercial or educational arenas, does not sanction attention to something, it is not taken seriously enough to reward those who study it. It is that simple.I was told, by very well-meaning intellectuals, that Italian American literature was not an appropriate subject for serious scholarly study: there was not enough scholarship to build upon; the writers had not achieved a high enough quality of writing or a mass great enough to warrant such work. So, it is no surprise to me that if I, as a serious US American student of literature was pushed away from it, that the same would happen to other potential scholars in other parts of the world. It took a while for Italian American literature to be identified as such. This had to do with the late entry of Italian Americans to the ranks of critics and scholars who began to pay attention to it. It is part of what I call Indigenuity, a word that came to me while listening to a conversation among LatinX writers Cherrie Moraga, Celia Herrera Rodriguez and Luis Rodriguez in a recent online conversation (Las Maestras Center 2021) in the series “In Good Company: The Latinx Public Voice.” The trio discussed the importance of connecting to their Indigenous cultures as they developed their responses to living in today's world. Listening to their rich exchange prompted me to post the following in the chat: Indigenuity is created by every human being connecting to the energies that were lost through acculturation to whatever it is that America meant to those indigenous people of other places who came here as immigrants. Deep inside we are all indigenous to some place. That is the place that we all need to return to connect us to each other as humans, and not by fighting the identity categories that material powers have devised to divide us. You are all speaking the truths that we must carry back into our peoples as messages of hope.An Internet search for “Indigenuity” turned up the following earlier use of the word in the work of author and activist Daniel R. Wildcat, a Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and author of Red Alert: Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge.More often than not, it takes the work of Indigenous critics to draw attention to writing and art produced by members of a culture who are not naturally part of the dominant culture(s) of a society. Gramsci alluded to this when he introduced the idea of the organic intellectual, and it's something that I took to heart as I began my foray into the study of Italian American contributions to American literature. This certainly was the case for the African American, LatinX American, Jewish American, and other scholars who challenged the canon of US American literature that had been set up and studied by the early academic institutions, and who still challenge it today. What they were doing to culture was what Wildcat says must be done in our approaches to protecting our ecosystem.Because of the work of Olga Peragallo, Rose Basile Green, and Helen Barolini, people began to pay attention to such a thing as Italian American literature, something I could not even have imagined during my earlier education, in which I studied first, African American literature with Professor Finley Campbell at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who first inspired me to begin my search for Italian American writers when he said, “White people got roots too!” Later, when I asked a professor if he thought we could study Italian American writers the way we were beginning to study African American, LatinX American, Asian American, and other groups, and he responded with a laugh and something like, “No. They are white.” Well, we may have been white in his eyes, but our work certainly wasn't “white” enough to be included in his courses. This series of events pushed me forward in my search for Italian American literature, and to join the work of other young (at the time) scholars, who through our own inherent version of Indigenuity were looking for the knowledge of our ancestors.But things are changing as more and more youth become interested in an aspect of American literature that they can claim some expertise in studying. Thanks to the work of Francesco Durante, Martino Marazzi, and other journalists and scholars, Italian American literature is much more available to the Italian student and scholar. And thanks to the works of critics such as Robert Viscusi, Mary Jo Bona, Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo Giordano, Edvige Giunta, and others, that work has been established, even sanctioned, for study. What we see now are students building upon that work and moving the study into new directions, and this is the key to changing both the Italian and American academies’ ideas of the usability of such scholarship.I suppose the first expansion of thinking beyond Italian American studies came when we shifted from studies of Little Italy to Italian American studies, and then to Italian North American studies. When we met the Italians in Canada, we began to see that there were many similarities and differences among our experiences, enough to make us realize that we were not talking about the same thing when we used the term Italian American. Traveling to Italy had the same effect, as did traveling to other parts of the world where we found Italian migrant communities. The process kept expanding until the only way to make sense of what we were studying and doing was to call it what it always was: the Italian diaspora.What I began to see when I cast my work in the larger model of Italian diaspora studies was that contact with the Italy of today began to change the way of considering the past: family stories connected to community, then regional, then national, and finally international stories of migration. When we first started using the term, we were accused of appropriating a term that had been preserved and reserved for the Jewish and, sometimes, the Armenian diaspora. But all cultures are always moving. And the more we studied, the more they moved; that is when we realized that Italian American studies was only one aspect of migration studies that we needed to know. Experiences such as these enabled us to connect to those who were doing work on Italian migration to other parts of the world.Led by the great work at the early Fondazione Giovani Agnelli, especially with their journal Altreitalie, international conferences began to form that considered comparative approaches to the study of Italian migration. At a conference in London (2016) launching the diasporic work of Loredana Polezzi and Charles Burdett and their “Transnational Italies” project, I met Paolo Baracchi, manager of Cultural Programs for Co.As.It; we discussed the need to create a series of opportunities for scholars of the Italian diaspora throughout the world to meet and discuss their shared interests. This led to a discussion with Dean Tamburri of the Calandra Institute. The result was the creation of a series of conferences that began in Australia (2018), then moved to New York (2018), Genova (2019), and now is seeking to continue in Argentina (2022). It is our hope that these encounters will foster collaboration and sharing of resources that will advance the study of Italian diaspore.

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