The Status of Interpretation in Italian American Studies
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Forum Italicum Filibrary Series No. 30 The Status of Interpretation in Italian American Studies Proceedings of the first Forum in Italian American Criticism [FIAC] Edited by Jerome Krase ✦ Forum Italicum Publishing ✦ Stony Brook, NY Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data forthcoming ISBN 1–893127–32–X Sponsored by the Alfonse M. D’Amato Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies at Stony Brook University Forum Italicum Center for Italian Studies State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794–3358 USA www.italianstudies.org Copyright © 2011 by Forum Italicum Publishing All Rights Reserved Cover design: Stony Brook University, Office of Communications All rights reserved. TABLE OF CONTENTS Conference Rationale Peter Carravetta ..................................................................................... vii Introduction Jerome Krase .......................................................................................... xi The Ice Margin Robert Viscusi ......................................................................................... 19 Commedia della Morte: Theories of Life and Death in Italian American Culture Fred Gardaphè ........................................................................................ 31 Reflections on Italian Americans and “Otherness” Anthony Julian Tamburri ........................................................................ 45 Renewing the Conceptual Dimensions of Italian-American Writing and Scholarship William Boelhower ................................................................................. 61 Via the Margin of the Poetic Djelal Kadir ............................................................................................ 69 Questioning the Traditionalism of Italian American Literature Martino Marazzi ..................................................................................... 79 Interpreting the Italian Look: Visual Semiotics of Ethnic Authenticity Jerome Krase .......................................................................................... 86 Creolizing the Lack: Interpreting Race and Racism in Italian America Francesca Canadé Sautman ................................................................... 122 Whiteness and Ethnicity in Italian-American Historiography Stefano Luconi ........................................................................................ 146 Theorizing Italian American History: The Search for an Historiographical Paradigm Gerald Meyer .......................................................................................... 164 The Dog Catches His Tail: A Critical Reflection on the Value of an Italian American Identity in Personal Development Donna Chirico ........................................................................................ 185 Re-interpreting Italian-American Politics: The Role of Ethnicity Ottorino Cappelli .................................................................................... 201 Index ................................................................................................................ 229 Contributors ..................................................................................................... 235 Conference Program ........................................................................................ 239 CONFERENCE RATIONALE The recently instituted Alfonse D’Amato Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies at Stony Brook University is committed to launch and promote a number of academic, cultural, and social activities across several disciplines. Among these a central concern will be Critical Thinking. Con- ceived as an on-going collaborative effort and addressing some of the press- ing issues of our times, the Forum in Italian American Criticism (FIAC) project will engage with and bring together the most probing interdiscipli- nary work by scholars, thinkers, professionals and artists who are engaged in matters Italian, Italian American, and American Italian. During the past twenty years, Italian American Studies in particular have made great strides at all levels, from increased archival work to the publication of rare or forgotten materials, from growth in college course offerings to the establishment of newer academic lines, from far ranging critical production to translations and international conferences. The first FIAC conference aims to take stock of these advances, effect a critique of competing views, and propose new hermeneutical models of analysis for the future. The interventions at the first FIAC Symposium will touch upon dif- ferent aspects of the discipline in relation to the changing times and the pragmatic need to reconsider the viability of creating more Italian American Minors, Majors or Concentrations within existing university departmental offerings, and whether an Italian American curriculum should make certain other academic requirements mandatory, such as learning Italian, sojourn- ing in Italy for a semester or more, or studying social history. The FIAC project is strongly committed to engage and team up with other disciplines as presently defined in university curricula not only to expand the range of knowledges required to better understand this hybrid and unsettling field of investigation, but also and more concretely to explore more tangible em- ployment opportunities for our students and make evident the usefulness of this background in various non-academic professions, such as social work, jurisprudence, various media and publishing sectors, politics and a host of community organizations. But in order to effect meaningful changes in these areas, a broader set of issues is now due for re-examination in light of more complex transfor- mations in the society at large, especially since the beginning of the new mil- vii lennium. Clearly some of the keywords, and academic-political movements that created them, and which have helped re-launch Italian American Studies in the eighties and the nineties, have lost some of their urgency or at the very least must be reconceptualized. Though still an academic “minority” Italian American Studies are no longer at “the margins.” Italian Americans have put much work in the issue of identity, but this understandably mostly in terms of socio-political recognition. The same goes with gender, which has opened up new pathways of research. Yet we need further metacritical commentary on these topics. This goes hand in hand with the by now overworked associ- ation of the field with ethnicity: how necessary and indeed useful is it to con- tinue to locate Italian American studies in the province of ethnic studies? Are not ethnic studies themselves in deep need of revision? FIAC intends to look at whether these interconnected issues are still viable in a perennially uncertain post-9/11 era. The mood is different, the national and international agendas have significantly changed, institutional and financial priorities are much more clearly marked (generally away from the humanities), even the postmodern is dead. The question, then, remains: what is Italian American Criticism a criticism of? Is it just of the activities and production of a variously defined “minority”? Or, and turning the ta- bles, could it not rather become the launching platform to further explore the sense of language, society, history, Italy, America, the West? Audacious as this perspective may be, it is in this light that FIAC in- tends to raise the critical and philosophical stakes. We intend to see whether it is still fruitful to continue working with the known self-canceling di- chotomies: Italian-American, identity-difference, marginal-mainstream, immigrant-assimilated, and other either/or dyads, when there is always a risk of validating essentialist projects and logical conundrums: is one Italian or American? And what if one claims to be both? Does arguing for one’s specific difference by necessity negate the fact that one possesses one or more identities? Can a person not be at the same time partly foreign, partly assimilated, as concrete social intercourse all too often demonstrates is what actually takes place in the real world? It is high time we take leave of facile dualisms and investigate instead pluralities, convergences both local and international, hybridity, mobility, and the interstices where a variety of ap- parently unrelated forms of interaction yield new social subjects and new lines of inquiry and intervention. The object of the first FIAC conference is precisely to see what is the status quaestionis of criticism with regard to the above questions in order viii to map out where we stand, and where we might choose to go in the future. The symposium will emphasize theory, from the Greek Theōria; the Theōrós is one sent on a delegation to observe and participate in a celebration. The root of the word contains the sense of light, of god even. Metaphorically, then, a theory offers an overall picture of something, whether a spectacle, a concept, or a situation. It is from within a theory that we can determine specificities, pathways, patterns, discursive formations, clusters of symbols, and so on. Accordingly, the symposium is organized around “views” or perspectives anchored in the different disciplines or emanating from a cir- cumstance, an event or even existing keywords. PETER CARRAVETTA Alfonse M. D’Amato Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies Stony Brook University (October 2008) Acknowledgements The first Forum in Italian American Criticism has been organized