Preface Introduction
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Notes Preface 1. Luisa Pretolani's video, Things I Take, which deals with Indian women im migrants, speaks to the experience of emigration in ways that transcend the specific experience of a single ethnic group. The issues the women who appear in this video address relate to the significance of and repercussions on one's sense of self of the separation from one's homeland. 2. See Gilbert and Gubar's feminist classic The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), in which they ofTer adefinition of anxiety of authorship, which they jux tapose to the more masculine "anxiety of influence" (50), the title subject of Harold Bloom's study. 3. I began to study Italian American literature and minority literatures not in graduate school, but in the years following my graduation, in the early 1990s. 4. My first actual encounter with Italian American literature actually oc curred in 1983, at a conference on Italian American Studies of the AISNA (ItalianAssociation ofNorthAmerican Studies).The conference was orga nized by my then professor of American Literature at the University of Catania, Maria Vittoria D'Amico. I was one of a handful of undergraduate students involved in the organization of the conference. There, I met sev eral American professors, includingJohn Paul Russo, who would later ofTer me a teaching assistantship at the University of Miami. 5. Giunta, "The Quest forTrue Love: Nancy Savoca's Domestic Film Comedy." 6. In 1987, DeSalvo had also published-in England-Casting Off, an outra geous novel about Italian American women and adultery. 7. Oddly enough, much like other women and minority writers who, once they started looking, found literary sisters and ancestors, I, too, would later discover two other writers in my family, Giuseppe Minasola and Laura Emanuelita Minasola. Introduction 1. For a discussion of the problematic status of the term "Italian American," see Fausty and Giunta, "Quentin Tarantino:An Ethnic Enigma" (2001). For historical accounts of and perspectives on the racialization of Southern 146 Writing with an Accent Italian immigrants, see Richards (1999), Roediger (1994), and Guglielmo and Salerno. 2. Many Italian American women claim a cultural, if not geographical, con nection to Southern Italy and more specifically, Sicily-even if their fam ilies are not from the South or Sicily-for example, Roman-born Alessandra Be11oni, whose work in music, song, and dance is rooted in the cultural history of the South, or Joanna Clapps Herman, who affirrns strong ties to Sicily. 3. For a critical/autobiographical ac count of the racialization of the Italian South-and especially Sicily-see Giunta, "Figuring Race: Kym Ragusa's Juoriloutside" (1999). Among Italian American women's texts that explore the issue of race and the identification of Sicilians as people of color, see Nancy Caronia, "Go to Hell" (Ciatu, Micallef and DiLeo 1998,216-25). 4. Examples would be Filipina writer Jessica Hagedorn and Chicana writer Ana Castillo. For an analysis of American attitudes toward language, see Rosina Lippi-Green's study, English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States (1997). Unfortunately, I did not come across the work of Green-Lippi, a professor of Linguistics, until after this book went to production. 5. Sol1ors proposes a distinction between "descent"-which he equates with the "hereditary"-and "consent"-which refers to one's choice to estab lish relationship through law and marriage. SoUors poses the question: "How can consent (and consensus) be achieved in a country whose citi zens are of such heterogeneous descent? And how can dissent be articu lated without falling back on myths of descent?" (Beyond Ethnidty 6). 6. In Multilingual America (1998), Werner Sollors laments that "With the ex ception of some discussion of Spanish, multiculturalism has paid very little attention to linguistic diversity, past or present" (4). 7. This is the translation of the poem by Miuccio and Patricia Donahue as it ap pears in the bilingual edition: "one time only/mother land/i betrayed youl Ileavingl leach instant/foreign land/i betray youllstaying" (Miuccio 7). 8. Giunta, ed., VL4 Special Issue on Italian American Women (215-8). 9. See Laurino's VJ,fre You Always an Italian?-especia11y "Clothes" (54-76) and "Milan, 1997" (94-9). 10. For definitions and discussions of ethnicity in U.S. contexts, see Werner Sol1ors's Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture and his edited collections The Invention of Ethnicity and Multilingual America, and Ishmael Reed, ed., MultiAmerica. See also varieties oJ Ethnic Critidsm, two special issues of the journal MELUS (1995 and 1998), and Suzanne Oboler, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives. 11. I use the term "minorities" not in its literal significance but in relationship to the political and cultural power held by a specific ethnic group. 12. See Gloria Anzaldua, ed., Making Face, Making Soul: Hacienda Caras: Cre ative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color; Cherrie Moraga and Glo ria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Notes 147 Color; and Lisa Albrecht and Rose M. Brewer, eds., Bridges of Power: m>men~ Multicultural Alliances. Davida J. Alperin, arguing in favor of"the interactive model and alliances based upon it;' as opposed to the pluralist or separatist models, suggests that "oppressed groups need to have separate spaces in which to gain their self-respect, name themselves, and discover their own history. These same groups need to form alliances with other groups in order to compare, contrast, and identifY the connections among different types of oppression" in order to develop possibilities for social change (Albrecht and Brewer 31). 13. Telephone conversation with Louise DeSalvo, 2 April 1996. 14. Edvige Giunta, e-mail correspondence with Caronia and Cappello,June 2000. 15. Conversation withJennifer Guglielmo, December 2000. 16. Telephone conversation with Kym Ragusa, 27 April 2001. 17. E-mail correspondence from Saracino to Giunta, 5 July 2000. 18. Blurb on the back cover of The Dream Book. 19. On regional provenance, see Micaela di Leonardo, The Uirieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among Califomia Italian-Americans. On the North-South dichotomy, see Antonio Gramsci's The Southem Question. 20. See my essays "Figuring Race" and "Dialects,Accents, and Other Aberrations:' 21. Another important book that deals with environmental politics and pub lic health is Susanne Antonetta's Body Toxie: An Environmental Memoir, pub lished after this book had gone to production. 22. The contribution of the following scholars should be highlighted: Fred Gardaphe, Anthony Tamburri, Mary )0 Bona, Robert Viscusi, Mary Frances Pipino, Caterina Romeo, Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, Peter Car ravetta, Mary Ann Mannino, Carol Bonomo Albright, John Paul Russo, Julia Lisella, Martino Marazzi, Blossom Kirschenbaum, and Franco Mulas. 23. The phrase "spazio/space" is the tide of Giuliana Miuccio's book of poems. Chapter 1 1. Mary Ann Fusco, "Telling Her Story in Italian American." 2. In the "Clothes" chapter of her memoir Were You Always an Italian? (54-76), Maria Laurino offers a compelling analysis ofVersace's career and self-fashioning, foregrounding issues of dass and regional origins (Versace was, notabIy, from Calabria). Laurino intertwines this analysis with a mem oiristic narrative on the impact of dothes on her own upbringing in sub urban New Jersey. 3. It is rare that women writers and filmmakers show an interest in the sub ject, although when they do, they demonstrate the subversive ways in which the subject can be approached, as Sandra Mortola Gilbert does in her poem "Mafioso" (The Dream Book 348-9) or Louise DeSalvo in a pass ing reference in ~rt,go. In "Mafioso;' the haunting question addressed by 148 Writing with an Accent the speaker to presumed Mafiosi undes obliquely exposes the fictitious connections between ail Italian Americans and the mafia forced on this ethnic group by American culture. DeSalvo matter-of-facdy and shrewdly implies that some Italian Americans she knew growing up rnight have been involved with the mafia: yet this simple fact does not drag all Italian Amer icans into organized crime, a fantasy carefuily cultivated by Hoilywood and American media. But DeSalvo has no need to dweil on this, as her life nar rative in Vertigo illustrates that while she had to deal with many troubling issues in her life, the mafia was not one of them. Self-conscious and self parodic representations also can help to change the aesthetics of stereotyp ing because they call attention to their culturally and historicaily deterrnined existence. In the Preface to Benedetta in Guysterland, Fred Gardaphe notes that "What Mario Puzo romanticized in The Goclfather (1969), what Gay Talese historicized in Honor Thy Father (1971), Giose Rimanelli has parodied in Benedetta" (16-7). Gardaphe righdy notes that this novel enables Rimanelli to transcend "the Italianl American subject" (17). At the same time, through its parodic focus on mafia, it also "teHs the story of America's re lationship with Italy and debunks the traditional stereotype of the Ital ianlAmerican gangster" (Rimanelli 19). 4. Texts such as Leonardo Sciascia's La Sicilia come metcifora and Giovanni Fal cone's Cose di cosa nostra should be necessary homework for anyone want ing to understand the history of the mafia phenomenon, induding its most recent developments. 5. Ed Guerrero argues that, rather than challenging HoHywood conventions concerning race, inJungle Fever Lee perpetuates them in the most conser vative rnanner. For a discussion of representation of Italian Americans in Spike Lee's movies, see artides by Aste, Bensoussan, and Pierson in Shades cif Black and White, eds.Ashyk, Gardaphe, and Tamburri. See also Verdicchio, "Spike Lee's Guineas." 6. Nancy Savoca's film True Love offers an imaginative alternative to the stereotypes of the Italian American family presented by Moonstruck.