Diversity in Italian Studies

Diversity in Italian Studies

Author: Siân Gibby

Publisher: John D. Calandra Italian-American Institute

Published: 2021-03

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9781939323118

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Contributing authors: Sole Anatrone, Nicolino Applauso, Ryan Calabretta-Sajder, Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto, Mary Ann McDonald Carolan, John Champagne, Mark Chu, Shelleen Greene, Kristi Grimes, Julia Heim, Akash Kumar, Kenyse Lyons, Vetri Nathan, Deborah Parker, Deanna Shemek, Alessia Valfredini, Gaoheng Zhang. This volume of essays embodies the genesis of change in Italian studies. In essays theoretical and practical, scholars set out to draw the contours of a new interactive and responsive map. Looking with fresh eyes and scholarly thoroughness at decades-old learning systems, they identify problems and challenge assumptions that undergird these systems' limitations and legacies. Fundamental new approaches, including those emerging from the experiences of Black and other non-White students and professors as well as of LGBTQIA+ scholars and others, are brought to bear in this frank re-evaluation. Facing the task of effecting the radical changes necessary for creative development, these scholars look hopefully and with determination toward the future of Italian studies.


From Da Ponte to the Casa Italiana

From Da Ponte to the Casa Italiana

Author: Barbara Faedda

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-11-21

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 0231546408

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The Casa Italiana—a neo-Renaissance palazzo located on Amsterdam Avenue near 117th Street—has been the most important expression of the Italian presence on Columbia University’s campus since its construction in 1927. As a site of interdisciplinary scholarship and promotion of Italian culture, the Casa Italiana has made a substantial contribution to the academic study of Italy in America and the understanding of Italian cultural identity abroad. Celebrating the Casa’s ninetieth anniversary, From Da Ponte to the Casa Italiana documents and recounts the history of the individuals, both Italian and American, who contributed to the formation of Columbia University’s rich tradition of Italian studies. Barbara Faedda’s succinct yet detailed historical survey begins at the dawn of Italian studies at Columbia with Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s witty librettist who became the charismatic founder of the New York Metropolitan Opera and Columbia’s first professor of Italian. Covering figures such as the former revolutionary Eleuterio Felice Foresti, Faedda elucidates the complex and often controversial dimensions of the Casa’s history, highlighting protagonists such as the talented but equivocal Giuseppe Prezzolini and Columbia’s president Nicholas M. Butler, as well as Italian-American students and community members. The Casa played a significant role in U.S.-Italian relations from its foundation, and at one point it came under fire, accused of ties to Mussolini and pro-Fascist leanings. Synthesizing archival documents with the work of historians, From Da Ponte to the Casa Italiana tells the compelling stories of the Casa and several of its leading figures, whose influence on the university can still be felt today.


Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives

Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives

Author: Marie Orton

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-10-26

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 168393315X

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Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives brings together creative literary works and scholarly articles. Both address the changes and challenges to identity formation in an Italy marked by the migrations, populism, nationalism, and xenophobia, and analyze diversity and the affirmation of belonging.


Transnational Italian Studies

Transnational Italian Studies

Author: Charles Burdett

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2020-07-17

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 178962729X

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Transnational Italian Studies is specifically targeted at a student audience and is designed to be used as a key text when approaching the disciplinary field of Italian studies. It allows the study of Italian culture to be construed and practised not simply as the inquiry into a national tradition but as the study of the interaction of cultural practices both within Italy itself and in those parts of the world that have witnessed the extent of Italian mobility. The text argues that Italian culture needs to be considered in a transnational/transcultural perspective and that an understanding of linguistic and cultural translation underlies all approaches to the study of Italian culture in a global context. Contributions deploy a range of methodological approaches to understand and illustrate how language operates, how culture inhabits and constitutes public and private space, how notions of time operate within people’s lives, and the multiple ways in which people experience a sense of personhood. Chapters stretch from the medieval period to the present and demonstrate how transnational Italian culture can be critically addressed through the examination of carefully chosen examples. Contributors: Alessandra Diazzi, Andrea Rizzi, Barbara Spadaro, Charles Burdett, Clorinda Donato, David Bowe, Derek Duncan, Donna Gabaccia, Eugenia Paulicelli, Fabio Camilletti, Giuliana Muscio, Jennifer Burns, Loredana Polezzi, Marco Santello, Monica Jansen, Naomi Wells, Nathalie Hester, Serena Bassi, Stefania Tufi, Teresa Fiore and Tristan Kay.


Italian Prisoners of War in Pennsylvania

Italian Prisoners of War in Pennsylvania

Author: Flavio G. Conti

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-10-19

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1611479983

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During World War II 51,000 Italian prisoners of war were detained in the United States. When Italy signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943, most of these soldiers agreed to swear allegiance to the United States and to collaborate in the fight against Germany. At the Letterkenny Army Depot, located near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, more than 1,200 Italian soldiers were detained as co-operators. They arrived in May 1944 to form the 321st Italian Quartermaster Battalion and remained until October 1945. As detainees, the soldiers helped to order, stock, repair, and ship military goods, munitions and equipment to the Pacific and European Theaters of war. Through such labor, they lent their collective energy to the massive home front endeavor to defeat the Axis Powers. The prisoners also helped to construct the depot itself, building roads, sidewalks, and fences, along with individual buildings such as an assembly hall, amphitheater, swimming pool, and a chapel and bell tower. The latter of these two constructions still exist, and together with the assembly hall, bear eloquent testimony to the Italian POW experience. For their work the Italian co-operators received a very modest, regular salary, and they experienced more freedom than regular POWs. In their spare time, they often had liberty to leave the post in groups that American soldiers chaperoned. Additionally, they frequently received or visited large entourages of Italian Americans from the Mid-Atlantic region who were eager to comfort their erstwhile countrymen. The story of these Italian soldiers detained at Letterkenny has never before been told. Now, however, oral histories from surviving POWs, memoirs generously donated by family members of ex-prisoners, and the rich information newly available from archival material in Italy, aided by material found in the U.S., have made it possible to reconstruct this experience in full. All of this historical documentation has also allowed the authors to tell fascinating individual stories from the moment when many POWs were captured to their return to Italy and beyond. More than seventy years since the end of World War II, family members of ex-POWs in both the United States and Italy still enjoy the positive legacy of this encounter.


Queering Italian Media

Queering Italian Media

Author: Sole Anatrone

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-01-20

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1793616116

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Queering Italian Media analyzes and offers queer readings of LGBTQIA+ representation in Italian media. The contributors apply various understandings of "queer" and "media" as they discuss the relationship between the political and social lives of queer populations in Italy and investigate their representations in film, news media, television, social media, and viewer-generated media sites. Queering Italian Media examines queer positionality, challenges notions of Italianness as it relates to and is reflected in media, and queers understandings of viewer engagement and participation in media consumption and production.


Interrupted Narratives and Intersectional Representations in Italian Postcolonial Literature

Interrupted Narratives and Intersectional Representations in Italian Postcolonial Literature

Author: Caterina Romeo

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-01-17

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 3031100433

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This book argues for the importance of adopting a postcolonial perspective in analysing contemporary Italian culture and literature. Originally published in Italian in 2018 as Riscrivere la nazione: La letteratura italiana postcoloniale, this new English translation brings to light the connections between the present, the colonial past and the great historical waves of international and intranational migration. By doing so, the book shows how a sense of Italian national identity emerged, at least in part, as the result of different migrations and why there is such a strong resistance in Italy to extending the privilege of italianità, or Italianness, to those who have arrived on Italian soil in recent years. Exploring over 100 texts written by migrant and second-generation writers, the book takes an intersectional approach to understanding gender and race in Italian identity. It connects these literary and cultural contexts to the Italian colonial past, while also looking outwards to a more diffuse postcolonial condition in Europe.


Food and Women in Italian Literature, Culture and Society

Food and Women in Italian Literature, Culture and Society

Author: Claudia Bernardi

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1350137804

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This book explores how women's relationship with food has been represented in Italian literature, cinema, scientific writings and other forms of cultural expression from the 19th century to the present. Italian women have often been portrayed cooking and serving meals to others, while denying themselves the pleasure of the table. The collection presents a comprehensive understanding of the symbolic meanings associated with food and of the way these intersect with Italian women's socio-cultural history and the feminist movement. From case studies on Sophia Loren and Elena Ferrante, to analyses of cookbooks by Italian chefs, each chapter examines the unique contribution Italian culture has made to perceiving and portraying women in a specific relation to food, addressing issues of gender, identity and politics of the body.


Twentieth Century Italy

Twentieth Century Italy

Author: Jonathan Dunnage

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1317886917

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Following a historically chronological approach, and with a clear focus on the marked regional diversity characterising Italy, this volume analyses the impact of social, economic, cultural and political transformation on the lives of Italians. It assesses their living standards, their health and education, their working conditions and their leisure activities. The final part of the book examines contemporary Italian society in the light of the political and moral crisis of the early 1990s.


Uniformity and Diversity in Language Policy

Uniformity and Diversity in Language Policy

Author: Catrin Norrby

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2011-10-17

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1847694489

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This book brings together current research by leading international scholars on the often contentious nature of language policies and their practical outcomes in North America, Australia and Europe. It presents a range of perspectives from which to engage with a variety of pressing issues raised by multilingualism, multiculturalism, immigration, exclusion, and identity. A recurrent theme is that of tension and conflict: between uniformity and diversity, between official policies and real day-to-day life experiences, but also between policies in schools and the corporate world and their implementation. Several chapters present research about language policy issues that has previously not been fully or easily available to an English-language audience. Many of the chapters also provide up-to-date analyses of language policy issues in particular regions or countries, focusing on recent developments.