SAGGISTICA 14 THEATER OF THE MIND, STAGE OF HISTORY THEATER OF THE MIND, STAGE OF HISTORY Italian Legacies between Europe, the Mediterranean, and North America on the 150th Anniversary of Unification A Festschrift in Honor of Mario Mignone on his 70th birthday Edited by Peter Carravetta BORDIGHERA PRESS Library of Congress Control Number: 2014948817 Sponsored by The Alfonse M. D’Amato Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies at State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY, 11794 USA © 2014 by Peter Carravetta & authors All rights reserved. Parts of this book may be reprinted only by written permission from the respective authors, and may not be reproduced for publication in book, magazine, or electronic media of any kind, except for purposes of literary reviews by critics. Printed in the United States. Published by BORDIGHERA PRESS John D. Calandra Italian American Institute 25 West 43rd Street, 17th Floor New York, NY 10036 SAGGISTICA 14 ISBN 978‐1‐59954‐083‐2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Peter Carravetta ix Arturo Giovannitti and the American Literary Establishment Luigi Bonaffini 1 The Unfortunate Pilgrim: You Can’t Get There From Here Jerome Krase 17 Lingua Esule: The Risorgimento Exiles and the Teaching of Italian in the United States Stefano Luconi .........................................................................49 What Italy Got for Her Twenty‐First Birthday Sante Matteo.............................................................................76 Remittances and Purchases of Emigrants: Resource for the Development of the Unitary State Mario Mignone.......................................................................114 Intellectuals and Expatriates: Bridging the Gap Vincenzo Pascale.....................................................................146 Stories that Shaped Italian Unification: Ugo Foscolo’s Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis Joseph Perricone......................................................................157 Tommaso Bordonaro’s La spartenza: Between Tradition and Singularity Anita Pinzi .............................................................................178 An Allegorist in America: Cultural Identity in Calvino’s Travelogues from the United States Alessandro Raveggi 193 Il Mutualismo dei Siciliani d’America Marcello Saija 215 You are an Italian American Writer, Like it or Not Richard Vetere 276 Contributors283 Index of Names 287 Conference Program 292 INTRODUCTION he year 2011 marked the 150th anniversary of the founding T of the modern nation‐state of Italy. Innumerable conferences and celebrations were held in Italy and abroad in which scholars, critics, intellectuals of all stripes and of course students and teachers reflected upon, and expressed their views on, the meaning of this socio‐historical event. In Italy political authorities went all out to sponsor marches, exhibits, publications, and media programs. The number of flags visible even in stores, cafes, stadiums, and of course around monuments was impressive. A spirit of reconnaissance, pride, and positive reassessment of the country’s heritage was paraded everywhere. As with all such national‐popular celebrations, there were many contrarian and dissident voices that managed to grab attention. The national allegory was not a thorough success story, it was argued. There were, and there still are, some complex, unresolved, often dark aspects to the (Hi)story. Starting with the disturbing overarching possibility that the present configuration, born on throws of widespread nationalistic uprisings in the XIX century, may be approaching the end of a historical cycle, and at least theoretically the nation‐state is in dire straits, as its “historical necessity” or “moment” may have outlived its reason for being. Not that people – patriots to presidents – ever let go of their cherished myths of the motherland easily, without putting up a fight. Whatever the variety of interpretations, certain facts are obvious: the European Union and the growing trans‐nationality of capitalism have weakened sovereignty, exacting new compromises and inaugurating processes of bi‐ and viii multi‐lateral exchanges and organization for which the tenets of the previous century seem inadequate; social and political configurations that consolidated during the half‐century of the Cold War frayed and a substantial number of ideological and institutional frameworks started rattling perilously; the welfare state entered a now perennial state of crises and is in danger. The economic miracle of the Sixties and the Seventies that catapulted Italy among the top seven richest countries in the world is fast becoming a memory. Unprecedented immigrations, endemic corruption, and undecisive policies have weakened the sense of an alleged homogeneity that was cobbled over ten‐twelve decades, surviving the wreckage of two world wars and a dictatorship. 2011 was indeed an appropriate juncture to look back and reckon with what has actually been happening, or at least to attempt to reframe the narrative. In particular, it was a time to expand the historical memory and consider issues, problems, and the lives of people who have not made it into the schoolbooks. If some citizens in Italy could not understand why anyone could be critical of the country’s success, perhaps it was in part due to the fact that so much had been forgotten, suppressed, or conveniently ignored. With these ideas in the background, the D’Amato Chair organized a two‐day conference to attempt some inroads into this complex network. Under the aegis of the Forum in Italian American Criticism (FIAC), which I launched in 2008, and which to date has organized seven major annual gatherings, the conference aimed at charting various itineraries through little explored clusters of what we can rightly call “Italies,” in the plural, and which have existed within and outside of the ix nation‐state called Italy. These Italies are not to be understood solely in terms of circumscribed socio‐geographical sites – as colonies, professional settlements, or ethnic enclaves, – though these of course have been and continue to be the source of powerful and intriguing discourses. The Italies we wished to explore are those marked by a more subterranean genealogy, the rhizomes that inform symbolic presences in art, architecture, jurisprudence, and streams of cultural products which by their very nature are – and actually have been – trans‐national, often created without anyone realizing that they were somehow “Italian” and yet manifest unmistakable signs associated with the historical palimpsest called Italy. The conference wished to be an open forum which, starting from the peninsula, engaged larger constellations – the Europe, Mediterranean, and North America indicated by the subtitle ‐‐ and perhaps propose some new ideas on how Italian culture may develop in the near and far future. No better metaphor to serve this broad objective than by looking at how Italians themselves have performed as if it were a mental proscenium where irony and tragedy, comedy and melodrama stood at crossroads interrogating themselves on the sense of these 150 years, and looked at the history of a people in a world‐historical framework, however one wishes to understand the notion of history. The conference, which featured sixteen speakers (see Program at end of book), was dedicated to Mario Mignone, Distinguished Service Professor of Italian, and Founder and Director of the Center for Italian Studies at Stony Brook University, as well as editor for a quarter of a century of the x journal Forum Italicum. In a period of over thirty years Mignone has brought well over 3000 students to study Italian language and culture at the Stony Brook Rome Center, which he also started. A committed intellectual and author of critical works on fiction and theatre, as well as on Italian migration, editor of several anthologies and author of the most accessible general Introduction to Modern Italy, it is fitting that on his 70th birthday the community of friends, colleagues, and scholars dedicate this gathering to him as a token of appreciation for his lifetime achievement in bridging cultures across time and space Peter Carravetta Stony Brook, August 2014 xi ARTURO GIOVANNITTI AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY ESTABLISHMENT Luigi Bonaffini CUNY Brooklyn College rturo Giovannitti knew three languages well: Italian, AEnglish, and French, but French was certainly much less important than the other two, and according to his son Len he could also read Spanish and German. In a short time he was able to reach an extraordinarily high level of linguistic competence in English, both spoken and written, and the accounts that have come down to us in that respect, even from Americans, speak of an exceptional ability. Eric Amfitheatrof, for instance, says that “Giovannitti was a fascinating and imposing figure ... his language rich and fabulous.”1 In dealing with Giovannitti’s relationship with the American literary establishment, I will focus on two periods: the first beginning with the year of the Lawrence trial of 1912 1 Joseph Harrington, Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003) 117. From: Theater of the Mind, Stage of History. Bordighera Press, 2015 “Arturo Giovannitti” until 1919, the year in which Giovannitti appears in Untermeyer’s important anthology; and then the second very recent period, that covers the last fifteen years and unexpectedly shows a renewed interest for the socially