By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America

8: Revival/Risorgimento Stories Continue Shaping U.S. Italian American Writing

8 Revival/Risorgimento
Stories Continue SHAPING U.S. ITALIAN AMERICAN WRITING Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano. One who goes slowly, goes soundly, goes far. —Italian proverb The storyteller joins the ranks of the teachers and sages. . . . The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself. —Walter Benjamin, Illuminations REVIVAL, ITALIAN AMERICAN STYLE From the voices of justice to the voices of mortality, Italian Americans have adapted folk materials from their ancestors’ paesi to create artful narratives that resist oppressions of silence, overlaying them with individual and communal uses of voice. The English word “revival,” the first part of this concluding chapter’s title, with its emphasis on restoration and reintroduction, suggests the usefulness of retrieval in an effort to restore to vitality and to restore to general use and acceptance (OED 2531). Its Italian quasi-equivalent,“risorgimento,” functions to ballast the 211 212 By the Breath of Their Mouths activity of retrieval, and yet its meaning carries a more weighty significance. The revolutionary movement known as il Risorgimento began in early nineteenth-century Italy and led to the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy (1861) and its partial unification (1871), establishing northern Italian governmental control of all regions. Despite Garibaldi’s successful defeat of the Bourbon forces by way of Sicily, southern Italians in particular felt the sting of being “conquered” by their own country— the Piedmontese government, which was as foreign to those in the Mezzogiorno as the idea of nationalism itself as many “had never encountered the term Italia before” (Duggan 135, 130). Of the many rebellions that erupted after unification, including local strikes by farm and sulfur workers in Sicily, popularly known as the Fasci siciliani, aimed to “mobilise the peasants and improve their pay,” which was crushed by the Crispi government (Duggan 167), no rebellion was fiercer than leaving their old villages in a new nation that ignored their economic needs. In the peak years of their migration—1880–1910— Italians left a country that did not exist as a nation for them until they left it en masse. Their emigration from their homeland was an uprising that comprised “the final and most emphatic protest of all—the mass exodus of millions of Italians in forthcoming generations who were no longer able to tolerate the economic and political inequities decreed by the new government in the name of progress and social justice” (Mangione and Morreale 61). While the Italian migration was part of a changing global economy that enabled emigrants from many countries to leave, migration effectively allowed disenfranchised Italian rural workers and artisans to use mobility as an act of resistance against a newly unified Italy. In America, immigrants became Italian. In America, Italian Americans became European. Writers of Italian America empathized deeply with the stories they heard from parents, extended families, and communities, incorporating voices of folk wisdom and individualism into a multivocal canon that reflects and enhances U.S. multiethnic writing, part and parcel of the verbal productions of U.S. writers. One of the central ways Italian American works have been revitalized is through the intertwining activities of book reprinting and classroom teaching. Susan VanZanten Gallagher explains that a critical perspective that highlights the way “social, ethnic, and gender positions construct aesthetic and cultural value” helps to reinforce the preeminence of how one reads, opening up further discussion regarding the material conditions in place that make it possible to read works and adopt them for teaching on syllabi (55). If we accept Gallagher’s assertion that “pedagogy often Stories Continue 213 begins the canonical process rather than existing only as a product of that process” (66), then we might better appreciate the inseparable nexus of manuscript publishing, personal advocacy, word-of-mouth sponsorship, prescient publishers, scholarly critiques, conference panels, book exhibits, and, not the least—syllabi inclusion.1 When all is said and done, the classroom and the syllabus insure the reinforcement of a book maintaining visibility and, whether or not it is taught to students as noncanonical, it is received, as Jeffrey Insko explains, by students as canonical (346), echoing John Guillory’s explanation that individual works “confront their receptors first as canonical, as cultural capital” (56).The 1996 republication of Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish is a vivid example of the intimate connection between the pedagogical and the canonical. In 1980, with a press run of only one thousand copies, the...