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  • By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America
  • Jessica Maucione (bio)
By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America. Mary Jo Bona. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. 314 pages. $75.00 cloth; $24.95 paper.

In By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America, Mary Jo Bona gathers together a multitude of historical and contemporary artistic and scholarly voices that speak to, and ultimately celebrate, the potential and necessity of literary scholarship not only to unveil a canon that has been largely ignored by the literary academy, but to help construct it. Bona has been traversing the landscape of Italian American studies since the 1980s, creating roadways and now an extensive cartography for readers, scholars, and students in the field. While Bona’s first book, Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers (1999), effectively stakes out space in the academy for Italian American feminist literary criticism, By the Breath of Their Mouths maps a world of Italian American literary studies that comprises narrative, cultural, social, postcolonial, and critical race theories along with intersections of gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity studies; her subjects of analysis and juxtaposition include multiple genres from oral and written traditions, such as stories, folktales, biographies, memoirs, poetry, and fiction.

Remarkably, these gathered voices harmonize. As Bona charts narratives of resistance within and across multifarious genres and fields, she locates and revalues “an artistic community that we might call Italian America” (5). Bona’s notion of resistance encompasses a continuum from distrust of and noncompliance with mainstream authorities, both Italian and American, to revolutionary critiques of Italian colonialism and American capitalism. Resistance to dominant culture is not only what threads together various Italian American texts; in addition, Bona’s own text pushes against established parameters of the academic monograph. In the third chapter, “Story/Racconto—Una chiacchierata nel passato: Rosa and Marie of Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant,” Bona defines all good storytelling as necessarily collaborative and “fundamentally communal” (82). As Bona explains, although Marie Hall Ets served as Rosa Cassettari’s transcriber, Ets was unable to publish Cassettari’s story under both of their names—“a reflection of individualistic paradigms” that refuse to recognize and value collaboration among women and minorities (75). In the following chapter, Bona writes collaboratively with JoAnne Ruvoli, a mentee and scholar in the field. Bona and Ruvoli rescue from [End Page 233] obscurity the novels of Guido D’Agostino, which “reflect an agrarian idealism nurtured in homeland Italy but sewn in new-world America” (95). D’Agostino’s novels are put into conversation with their Italian American contemporaries, as well as with the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Leo Marx. At the center of By the Breath of Their Mouths, ideology thus meets praxis in a coauthored chapter that models collaboration and demonstrates the essential interdependence of artists and scholars in Italian American literature specifically and multi-ethnic or minority discourses generally.

Serving as a corrective to popular (and too often would-be scholarly) simplifications, stereotypes, and romanticizations of Italian America, this book invites readers to enter into astonishingly defamiliarized territory. The opening chapter conceives of campanilismo (or localism) not as stagnating parochialism, but as a strategic village-mindedness that helps immigrants and their offspring retain Italianness while assimilating American values. Mutuality effectively complicates the discussion of resistance much as, as Bona notes, “furberia (wiliness) [is] tempered by deferenza (observance, deference)” in literary characters (78). Often, one person’s resistance is another’s fidelity.

Bona undoes Harold Bloom’s view that “mutuality signals weaker writing” (144), honors precursors and contemporaries in the field of Italian American studies, and devotes a chapter to the significance of what came before: “Precursor/Precursore—Mother’s Tongue: Italian American Daughters and Female Precursors.” Bona notes the importance of resisting Italian, American, and Italian American institutions, including the Catholic church and the patriarchal family structure, but she also explains that “[f]or many Italian American women writers, spiritual and literary redemption occurs through collaboration with rather than opposition to a parental guide, sometimes familial, often literary” (143). Building upon previously established concepts...

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