2008-2009

The Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in Italian American Studies

Thursday, September 18, 2008

The Intrepid Giuseppe Pitrè and his Collection of Sicilian Folk Tales

Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota, and Joseph Russo, Haverford College

The true treasures of European folklore are buried not in Germany, but in Sicily, and the greatest European folklorist of the nineteenth century was Giuseppe Pitrè (1841-1916). Pitrè was born into a family of fishermen in Palermo and became a medical doctor, councilman, and professor. He wrote over forty books and collected hundreds of fairy tales, legends, anecdotes, riddles, and myths and published them in Sicilian dialect. Indeed, his collection is the most important nineteenth-century collection of tales in dialect. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo translated the tales and edited a two volume collection The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè (Routledge, 2008). They will discuss the significance of Pitrè’s life and works, and read from the collection.

Monday, October 20, 2008

From “Terrone” to “Extra-comunitario”: The Evolution of Racism in Italian Cinema

Grace Russo Bullaro (Lehman College)

In films of the New Italian Cinema such as Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960), and Ciao, Professore! (1992), the “Southern question” takes on the cast of racism, with racial and cultural differences often overlapping. After the watershed years of the 1980s and 1990s, the discourse on racial identity and new definitions of ethnicity became full-blown with a spate of films that explored and redefined the boundaries of culture, ethnicity and otherness. What does it mean to be “Italian” in today’s multicultural Italy? This presentation will provide an overview of the current “migration cinema,” tracing the evolution of the discourse of “racism” from the 1950s to the current wave of films by directors such as Gianni Amelio, Carlo Mazzacurati, Francesco Munzi, and Ferzan Ozpetek.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Magic in the Mezzogiorno: The Anthropology of Ernesto De Martino

Dorothy Louise Zinn (Università degli Studi della Basilicata)

Ernesto De Martino (1908-1965) is widely acknowledged to be a founding figure of cultural anthropology in Italy, and yet his work remains almost entirely unknown in English-speaking countries. A brilliant and eclectic thinker, De Martino conducted several research expeditions in Southern Italy and the ethnographies he wrote remain classic works in Italian humanities. Employing a multidisciplinary perspective, De Martino’s approach to potions and healing charms, and the dancing frenzy induced by the bite of the Apulian taranta, embraced religious history, folklore, ethnopsychiatry, and ethnomusicology. Anthropologist Dorothy Louise Zinn, who translated and annotated De Martino’s The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism (Free Association, 2005), will discuss his research on the magical world of Southern Italian peasantry.

Monday, December 8, 2008

Italy Today: Facing the Challenges of the New Millennium

Mario B. Mignone (Stony Brook University)

Based on his book Italy Today: Facing the Challenges of the New Millennium (Peter Lang, 2007), Mario Mignone will present on post-World War II Italy to address the revolutionary years of the1970s and 1980s and the complexities of a postindustrial nation. How is Italy negotiating the challenges created by industrial, economic, and cultural globalization? The presentation will place special emphasis on discussing immigration to Italy and its impact on the country’s economy, politics, and culture.