In the century between 1870 and 1970, about twenty-seven million migrants left Italy to work and live abroad. As a result, the worldwide Italian diaspora reportedly numbers more than sixty million people. Until now, however, there has not been an anthology devoted to the literature of the Italian diaspora that places it in a global context. This landmark volume presents a truly international selection of works by more than seventy Italian-language poets who are writing in countries from Australia to Venezuela. Their poetry is collected here into eleven geographical regions. The history and current state of Italian-language poetry in each region receives a critical overview by a knowledgeable scholar, who also introduces each poet and provides a bibliography of his or her work. All poems appear on facing pages in both Italian and English. Poets of the Italian Diaspora is part of a long-range project, by the editors and contributors, to expand the boundaries of the Italian literary canon.
This volume studies the literary voices of the Italian diaspora in Britain, including 21 authors and 34 pieces of prose, verse, and drama. This book shows how authors both recount the history of the migrant community in the period 1880-1980 while creatively experimenting with hybrid forms of expression and blending words with visuals. Literary Voices of the Italian Diaspora in Britain discusses topical issues like migration and social integration, cultures and foods in transition, as well as plurilingualism. The book pays special attention to discussions of the horrors of the Second World War – especially on the tragedy of the Arandora Star (2nd July 1940) – to show this literary community’s political commitments. More importantly, it will begin to fill the void left by a critical tradition which has only appreciated the northern American and Australian branches of Italian writing.
Scholarship on Italian emigration has generally omitted the Julian-Dalmatians, a group of Italians from Istria and Dalmatia, two regions that, in the wake of World War Two, were ceded by Italy to Yugoslavia as part of its war reparations to that country. Though Italians by language culture, and traditions, it seems that this group has been conveniently excised from history. And yet, Julian-Dalmatians constitute an important element in twentieth-century Italian history and represent a unique aspect of both Italian culture and emigration. This ground-breaking collection of articles from an international team of scholars opens the discussion on these “forgotten Italians” by briefly reviewing the history of their diaspora and then by examining the literary and artistic works they produced as immigrants to Canada. Forgotten Italians offers new insights into such celebrated authors as Diego Bastianutti, Mario Duliani, Caterina Edwards, and Gianni Angelo Grohovaz, as well as visual artists such as Vittorio Fiorucci and Silvia Pecota. Profoundly marked by the experience of being uprooted and forced into exile, by life in refugee camps, and by the encounter with a new culture, first-generation Julian-Dalmatians in Canada used art and writing to come to terms with their anguished situation and to rediscover their cultural roots.
Providing the most complete record possible of texts by Italian writers active after 1900, this annotated bibliography covers over 4,800 distinct editions of writings by some 1,700 Italian authors. Many entries are accompanied by useful notes that provide information on the authors, works, translators, and the reception of the translations. This book includes the works of Pirandello, Calvino, Eco, and more recently, Andrea Camilleri and Valerio Manfredi. Together with Robin Healey's Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation, also published by University of Toronto Press in 2011, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations from Italian accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature.
For Italian immigrants and their descendants, needlework represents a marker of identity, a cultural touchstone as powerful as pasta and Neapolitan music. Out of the artifacts of their memory and imagination, Italian immigrants and their descendants used embroidering, sewing, knitting, and crocheting to help define who they were and who they have become. This book is an interdisciplinary collection of creative work by authors of Italian origin and academic essays. The creative works from thirty-seven contributors include memoir, poetry, and visual arts while the collection as a whole explores a multitude of experiences about and approaches to needlework and immigration from a transnational perspective, spanning the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. At the center of the book, over thirty illustrations represent Italian immigrant women's needlework. The text reveals the many processes by which a simple object, or even the memory of that object, becomes something else through literary, visual, performance, ethnographic, or critical reimagining. While primarily concerned with interpretations of needlework rather than the needlework itself, the editors and contributors to Embroidered Stories remain mindful of its history and its associated cultural values, which Italian immigrants brought with them to the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina and passed on to their descendants.
The Funambulists brings together the diverse poetry collections of six contemporary Arab diasporic women poets. Spanning multiple languages and regions, this volume illuminates the distinct artistic voice of each poet, yet also highlights the aesthetic and political relevance that unites their work. Marchi explores the work of Naomi Shihab Nye, a celebrated American poet of Palestinian descent; Iman Mersal, an Egyptian poet living in Edmonton, Canada, who writes in Arabic; Nadine Ltaif, a Lebanese poet who lives in Quebec and has adopted French as her language; Maram al-Massri, a Syrian poet writing in Arabic and living in France; Suheir Hammad, an American poet of Palestinian origin; and Mina Boulhanna, a Moroccan poet living in Italy and writing in Italian. Despite their varying geographical and political backgrounds, these poets find common ground in themes of injustice, spirituality, gender, race, and class. Drawing upon the concept of tension, Marchi examines both the breaking points and the creative energies that traverse the poetic works of these writers. These celebrated funambulists use their art of balance and flexibility bolstered by their courage and transgression to walk a tightrope stretched out across cultures, faiths, and nations.
Collected classic writings on, about, and from the formative years of the Italian-American experience, featuring fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. To appreciate the life of the Italian immigrant enclave from the great heart of the Italian migration to its settlement in America requires that one come to know how these immigrants saw their communities as colonies of the mother country. Edited with extraordinary skill, Italoamericana: The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880-1943 brings to an English-speaking audience a definitive collection of classic writings on, about, and from the formative years of the Italian-American experience. Originally published in Italian, this landmark collection of translated writings establishes a rich, diverse, and mature sense of Italian-American life by allowing readers to see American society through the eyes of Italian-speaking immigrants. Filled with the voices from the first generation of Italian-American life, the book presents a unique treasury of long-inaccessible writing that embodies a literary canon for Italian-American culture—poetry, drama, journalism, political advocacy, history, memoir, biography, and story—the greater part of which has never before been translated. Italoamericana introduces a new generation of readers to the “Black Hand” and the organized crime of the 1920s, the incredible “pulp” novels by Bernardino Ciambelli, Paolo Pallavicini, Italo Stanco, Corrado Altavilla, the exhilarating “macchiette” by Eduardo Migliaccio (Farfariello) and Tony Ferrazzano, the comedies by Giovanni De Rosalia, Riccardo Cordiferro’s dramas and poems, the poetry of Fanny Vanzi-Mussini and Eduardo Migliaccio. Edited by a leading journalist and scholar, Italoamericana presents an important but little-known, largely inaccessible Italian-language literary heritage that defined the Italian-American experience. Organized into five sections—”Annals of the Great Exodus,” “Colonial Chronicles,” “On Stage (and Off-Stage),” “Anarchists, Socialist, Fascists, Anti-Fascists,” and “Apocalyptic Integrated / Integrated Apocalyptic Intellectuals” —the volume distinguishes a literary, cultural, and intellectual history that engages the reader in all sorts of archaeological and genealogical work. “An addition to the great tradition of Italian-American literature and culture, this anthology of fiction, poetry, plays memoir and articles features the writing of Italians in America, writing from the “Little Italys” of the period, in their mother tongue, and fills a huge gap in the canon. A sophisticated, critical look at the writings of Italian immigrants to America across all genres, includes social and political commentary, a long labor of love for American editor Robert Viscusi . . . . A massive work of extraordinary power, that while scholarly and comprehensive, will have wide appeal.” —Publishers Weekly
This second volume of New Italian Migrations to the United States explores the evolution of art and cultural expressions created by and about Italian immigrants and their descendants since 1945. The essays range from an Italian-language radio program that broadcast intimate messages from family members in Italy to the role of immigrant cookbook writers in crafting a fashionable Italian food culture. Other works look at how exoticized actresses like Sophia Loren and Pier Angeli helped shape a glamorous Italian style out of images of desperate postwar poverty; overlooked forms of brain drain; the connections between countries old and new in the works of Michigan self-taught artist Silvio Barile; and folk revival performer Alessandra Belloni's reinterpretation of tarantella dance and music for Italian American women. In the afterword, Anthony Julian Tamburri discusses the nomenclature ascribed to Italian American creative writers living in Italy and the United States. Contributors: John Allan Cicala, Simone Cinotto, Teresa Fiore, Incoronata (Nadia) Inserra, Laura E. Ruberto, Joseph Sciorra, and Anthony Julian Tamburri.
Bound by Distance takes its place among a growing body of scholarship the goal of which is to challenge the kind of thinking that reproduces the "West" as a stable and homogenous political and discursive entity. The Italian nation, with its peculiar process of formation, the continuous tensions between its own northern and southern regions, and its history of emigration, provides an important case for complicating and reassessing concepts of national, racial, economic, and cultural dominance. The author analyzes the interactive space of the history of Italian state formation, Italian subaltern literature, Italian emigrant writing, and the current situation of North African and Asian immigrants to Italy, in order to contest the "feigned homogeneity" of the Italian nation and to complicate and reassess concepts of national, racial, economic, and cultural dominance.
The editors' goal in this book is to give a critical overview of where Italian/American literary and cultural studies are today. To this end, Beyond the Margin includes three types of essays: the characteristics of Italian/American literature and culture in a general sense; specific writers; and film.
