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Notes Preface 1. See Lawrence DiStasi, “How World War II Iced Italian American Culture ,” in Una storia segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II, ed. Laurence DiStasi (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 2001), p. 307. 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, Or, The Romance of Monte Beni (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 4. 3. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 56. 4. Mario Puzo, The Godfather (New York: Putnam, 1969), p. 92. 5. Vincenzo Ancona, Malidittu la lingua: Damned Language: Poetry and Miniatures, ed. Anna L. Chairetakis and Joseph Sciorra, trans. Gaetano Cipolla (New York: Legas, 1990). 6. This is the theory elaborated by Karen Horney in Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis (New York: Norton, 1945 ). Introduction 1. Bill Tonelli, The Amazing Story of the Tonelli Family in America: 12,000 Miles in a Buick in Search of Identity, Ethnicity, Geography, Kinship, and Home (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994), records Tonelli’s trip to visit as many people as he could find who shared his surname, all over the United States. He summarizes his results in this memorable passage: [The Tonellis] really don’t think much about their ancestry. Surrounded as Tonellis are by Americans (and even non-Americans) of every stripe and flavor, their pasts just don’t have much to do with their presents. The tie has been severed; no aspect of their lives speaks to their sense of themselves as creatures of history. At some unobserved point, they (or somebody before them) made a crucial transfer—they stepped out of the story of their blood and into that of their country. That’s mostly the work of real estate, the great transformer, for if they limited their associations 219 to individuals of similar provenance, they’d be very lonely people. They’re Americans , and that’s why their ancestors came here in the first place, I guess. (pp. 252–53) 2. On lynchings and anti-Italian discrimination, see Richard Gambino, Vendetta: The True Story of the Largest Lynching in U.S. History (Toronto: Guernica, 1998), pp. 129–41, as well as Sal La Gumina, WOP: A Documentary History of Anti-Italian Discrimination (Toronto: Guernica, 1999). 3. “Caesarism can be said to express a situation in which the forces of conflict balance each other . . . in such a way that a continuation of the conflict can only terminate in their reciprocal destruction.” Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), p. 219; “Si può dire che il cesarismo esprime una situazione in cui le forze in lotta si equilibrano . . . in modo che la continuazione della lotta non può concludersi che con la distruzione reciproca.” Antonio Gramsci, Note sul Machiavelli (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1977), p. 70. Connections between Caesarism and the Mafia run more or less implicitly throughout the essays in Luigi Barzini, From Caesar to the Mafia (New York: Library Press, 1971). 4. Goffredo Mameli, “Il canto degli italiani,” in Fratelli d’Italia: La vera storia dell’inno di Mameli, ed. Tarquinio Maiorino, Giuseppe Marchetti Tricamo , & Piero Giordana, translation by Robert Viscusi. (Milano: Mondadori, 2001), p. 133. The entire text of Mameli’s poem deserves study. For example, he writes, “Noi fummo per secoli / calpesti, derisi,/ perché non siam popolo, / perché siam divisi.” (“We were for centuries / abused and derided, / because we are not a people, / because we are divided.”) 5. See Michael La Sorte, La Merica: Images of Italian Greenhorn Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); see also Edmondo DeAmicis , Sull’ Oceano (Milano: Garzanti, 1996). 6. Temistocle Solera, libretto, in Nabucco (Nabocodonosor), ed. Giuseppe Verdi (Milano: Ricordi, 1970), pp. 242–53. English trans., Schiller Institute, http://www.schillerinstitute.org/music/va_pensiero.html [download March 3, 2003]. 7. The most comprehensive publication to date in this arena is Francesco Durante, ed., Italoamericana: Storia e letteratura degli italiani negli Stati Uniti 1776–1780 (Milano: Mondadori, 2001); see also Giuseppe Massara, Americani (Palermo: Sellerio, 1986). 8. Some texts by women authors come into this discussion, but separate histories of vision pertain specifically to women’s writing. See Helen Barolini, ed., The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (New York: Schocken, 1985); Mary Jo Bona, ed., The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian American Women’s Fiction (Toronto: Guernica, 1994), and Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); Mary Ann Mannino, Revisionary Identities: Strategies...

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