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The Philip V. Cannistraro
Seminar Series in Italian American Studies
Monday, September 18, 2006, 6 PM Most settlements of Italians around the world were not called "Little Italy." The phrase seems to have been invented in the United States. This paper focuses on New York in the 1880s, examining the social and urban landscape where the term "Little Italy" was invented. Associated from its earliest days with urban tourism and the search for novelty in the form of "safe danger," "Little Italy" came to be applied to Italian settlements in many other parts of the country and in other countries as well.
Monday, October 23, 2006, 6 PM In April 1941, the United States army drafted Michael Stabile of Nutley, New Jersey, one of thirteen children born to immigrant parents from southern Italy. Stabile kept a diary from the first day he reported for duty until he was discharged on June 30, 1945. Stationed in Pearl Harbor, Saipan, the Philippines, and Okinawa, Stabile's diary chronicled his military activities, his complaints about the institution's unfair treatment of the working-class and mainly Italian men, and his sexual encounters with prostitutes, local women of color, and other men. Set against the background of Hawaii's 1940s polyglot community, the diary offers insights into the often contradictory intersections of race, gender, class, and sexual identity that went into this working-class man's understanding of himself as a white American man.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006 Since the gangster's earliest appearance in American cinema, there has been regular association between the gangster figure and the Italian/American male. Perhaps no literary or cinematic figure has had such a profound effect on the development of an ethnic stereotype. The gangster becomes a telling figure in the tale of American race, gender, and ethnicity, a figure that reflects the autobiography of an immigrant group just as it reflects the fantasy of a native population. This talk, based on the recent Routledge publication of the same name, explores the gangster as embodying the traits that the dominant American culture represses and explains why Americans are so obsessed with it.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006 In the 1950s, America was seen as a vast melting pot in which white ethnic affiliations were on the wane and a common American identity was the norm. Yet by the 1970s, these white ethnics mobilized around a new version of the epic tale of immigration. The language and symbols of hardworking, self-reliant, and ultimately triumphant European immigrants found in literature, film, the visual arts, and scholarship have exerted tremendous force on political movements and public policy debates from affirmative action to contemporary immigration. In order to understand how white primacy in American life survived the withering heat of the Civil Rights movement and multiculturalism, Matthew Frye Jacobson argues in his new book Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America for a full exploration of the meaning of the white ethnic revival and the uneasy relationship between inclusion and exclusion that it has engendered in our conceptions of national belonging.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007, 6PM Widely acclaimed as America's greatest living film director, Martin Scorsese is also, some argue, the pre-eminent Italian-American artist. His most sustained filmmaking and the core of his achievement consist of five films on Italian-American subjects - Who's That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, "Raging Bull," "GoodFellas," and Casino - in addition to the documentary Italianamerican. In his book Gangster Priest (University of Toronto Press), Robert Casillo examines these films in the context of the history and culture of Southern Italy, from which the majority of Italian Americans derive. Forming a unified whole, Scorsese's Italian-American films offer a prolonged meditation on the immigrant experience, the relationship between Southern Italy and Italian America, intergenerational conflicts, and the development of Italian-American identity. Casillo argues that these films cannot be fully appreciated either thematically or formally without understanding the various aspects of Italian American ethnicity, as well as the nature of Italian-American cinema and the difficulties facing assimilating third-generation artists.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007, 6PM Eduardo Migliaccio (1882-1946), known as Farfariello, was widely considered one of the key figures of the Italian immigrant theatre and the "king" of the macchiette, theatrical sketches performed in his one-man shows. His satires in Neapolitan dialect brought to life a myriad of characters and their experiences in the New World during the mass migration in the early decades of the twentieth century. The macchiette portrayed the immigrants' hopes and disillusions in their search for better lives in a new social environment. With language being a key factor for theatrical success, Migliaccio proved to be a masterful observer of immigrant speech varieties ranging from Neapolitan dialect to dialectal Italian and Italianized colloquial English, and even to Italianized French and Spanish. The play with language, particularly with Italian-American loan words, the characters' comments and attitudes concerning language use, and the representation of their speech varieties reflect the gradually changing identities of Italian immigrants in New York.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007, 6PM Speaking to an unfriendly crowd at a 1969 Harlem rally, New York City mayoral hopeful Mario Procaccino proclaimed, "My heart is as black as yours." This gaffe was the Democrat's attempt to distance himself from his image as the "white backlash" candidate. Although Procaccino used rhetoric that echoed racist law-and-order politicians such as George Wallace, he sought to win the votes of African-American and white ethnic Democrats by reminding them that just a few years earlier, white establishment candidates had questioned whiteness of Italian Americans. The 1969 election pitted Procaccino and John Marchi, both Italian Americans, against the WASP liberal John V. Lindsay. In the process, the meanings of whiteness and Italian-Americaness became central campaign themes. The candidates, the voters, and newspaper reporters rooted their interpretations of ethnic and racial identity in stereotypes that reflected both American and Italian prejudices.
Monday, May 7, 2007, 6PM
This collaborative presentation emphasizes a political economic approach to ethnic enclaves and argues that the role of capital, and particularly ethnic banks, are important, often overlooked, aspects of "immigrant growth machines" that are transforming neighborhood spaces around the globe. These "machines" consist of elite entrepreneurs such as ethnic bankers and realtors who promote development and enclave formations. Since Little Italies and Chinatowns have historical as well as contemporary relevance in this regard, the thesis will be illustrated with photographs taken in cities in China, Italy, as well as the United States. Tarry Hum and Jerome Krase assess the transferability of the concept of a global neighborhood in an international context via ethnographic and visual views of the demographic and spatial transformations that create opportunities for exchange and interaction among multiple publics. This is no mere aesthetic exercise, as they argue that these local spaces in "global" neighborhoods also provide opportunities for multi-racial democracy.
All events are free.
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