The New World of Italian American Studies

Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative By Fred L. Gardaphé. Duke University Press, 1996

A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer By Anthony Julian Tamburri. SUNY Press, 1998

The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women Edited by Helen Barolini. Syracuse University Press, 1995; Reprint 2000

Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers By Mary Jo Bona. Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian/American Women's Fiction Edited by Mary Jo Bona. Guernica Press, 1994

Fuori: Essays by Italian/American Lesbians and Gays Edited by Anthony Julian Tamburri Bordighera, 1996

Italian American: The Racializing of an Ethnic Identity By David A. J. Richards. New York University Press, 1999

"Is European America dead?" asked Ishmael Reed, pointedly upbraiding the separatism of those who declared it killed in action in the culture wars or battles of identity politics. Reed sees the new world of Italian American studies as a major part of what he calls a "European American ethnic Renaissance" (xx). He may well be right. The explosion of interest in Italian Americana over the past decade comes from its concern not only for Italianità, but also for ways of mediating between the divisive separatism that has shadowed the large achievements of ethnic studies and a universalism based on the erasure of differences. How best to negotiate that distance? Road maps have been hard to find.

Approaches to ethnic literature have typically displayed road signs written in lexicons of opposition. Conflicts between marginal and mainstream culture, tradition-bound parents and their more assimilated children, and among ethnic groups have made tropes of distance and competitive rage commonplace in ethnic art. Jürgen Habermas has lamented that the claims of each group have seemed "all the more painful the more the tendencies to self-assertion take on a fundamentalist and separatist character" (118). Writing in Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995), Walter Benn Michaels explains why this seemed impossible to bypass: "There are no anti-essentialist accounts of identity. The reason for this is that the essentialism inheres not in the description of the identity, but in the attempt to derive the practices from the identity--we do this because we are this" (181).

Reed has, of course, not been alone in questioning the limitations of essentialist views of ethnic identity. K. Anthony Appiah has noted "that one reasonable ground for suspicion of much contemporary multicultural talk is that it presupposes conceptions of collective identity that are remarkably unsubtle in their understandings of the processes by which identities, both individual and collective, develop" (156). Ross Posnock has analyzed the limitations of what he calls the "identity/difference model" (24). David Hollinger has explored the plethora of terms that have emerged to accompany the demand for change: "postethnicity," "affiliate" and "disaffiliate" relations, "cosmopolitanism" and a "rooted cosmopolitanism" (6). Italian American studies participates in a growing movement of scholars, poets, and writers toward a more inclusive and flexible ethnic discourse.

By exploring the reflexive relationship between American and ethnic art, by reconfiguring the relationship between margin and mainstream and among ethnic groups as a two-way street, and by exploiting the fluidity of ethnic tropes and signs, Italian American studies advances theoretic models in which ethnic identity is not fixed and immutable but an open, unfolding social process of exploration and self-fashioning. In doing so Italian American studies provides models for public discourse that correlate with what Habermas implies may be the paradox of identity formation itself: "Persons become individualized only through a process of socialization" (113). Contemporary Italian American studies examines, especially through analyses of literature, socialization as an orchestration of the claims of individualism, community, and citizenship in a diverse America.

Despite differences in emphasis and approach among scholars, Italian American studies consistently acknowledges the importance of developing critical concepts of ethnic identity that can accommodate historical changes in both margin and mainstream and highlight...