Online course by Professor Margherita Ganeri with the support of Professor Emeritus Steven Sacco.
Italian-Americans make up one of the largest ethnic communities in the United States. The first emigrants from Italy arrived in the seventeenth century and a slow but steady stream followed. At the end of the nineteenth century, conditions in Italy deteriorated for millions of landless peasants, day laborers, artisans and craftsmen, especially in the impoverished South. So began one of the greatest migrations in human history. Millions of Italians embarked for other parts of the world: Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina, Canada and the United States. Between 1880 and 1924, millions of Italians went to America. Once there, they discovered conditions rarely resembled the image of a country whose streets were “paved with gold.” Instead, racism, discrimination, crime, corruption and difficult labor conditions greeted them.
This course will examine the forces that pushed emigrants to leave Italy and those that pulled them to the United States. We will examine the “melting pot,” “salad bowl,” and “garbage can” metaphors social scientists use to describe the immigrant experience. Students will focus on the larger forces that affected the immigrant experience (and therefore which apply to other immigrants groups as well). We will utilize concepts from other immigrant groups to delineate an Italian “diaspora.” In addition, we will introduce the concept of “l’avventura” to distinguish the Italian American experience from other ethnic groups. The course will explore the issues that impacted directly on Italians such as Catholicism and the images of Italians in American popular culture. A particular concern will be with Italian-American literature and the various attempts to forge a viable ethnic identity.
The focus of the seminar then moves to issues of race, gender and class. Were Italians white? What did it mean to be southern Italian as opposed to northern Italian? How did Italian Americans overcome prejudice and discrimination? At what price to their ethnicity? How did the patriarchal/matrilocal society of the Mezzogiorno transplant itself to America? How did gender roles evolve over generations? What challenges presented themselves to Italian concepts of masculinity and femininity? How were Italian radicals perceived in the early 20th century? What does the Sacco & Vanzetti case tells us about American and Italian American society? How and why did Italian Americans move left to right on the political spectrum? How and why are popular stereotypes of Italian Americans perpetuated in the mass media? These are just some of the questions to be addressed in reading, discussions, films and research papers.
Some questions for the seminar to consider: what is the significance of the fact that, as soon as it was physically possible and economically viable, millions of Italians left the new nation-state only one generation after its supposedly longed-for founding? The departure of its citizen-subjects is perhaps the greatest indictment of the failures of modern Italy. For much of the last century, these emigrants were seen as the dregs of Italian society: poor, often illiterate, bound to a semi-feudal society defined by patriarchy and superstition, scorned by Italians as their “cafoni” cousins and ignored by Italian historians. Robert Viscusi writes how “A whole nation walked out of the middle ages, slept in the ocean and awakened in New York in the twentieth century.” Yet these very emigrants—for the most part and not without failures—somehow managed not just to abide, but also to succeed. In the common phrase, they had “made America,” but at what price? What was it in Italian peasant society that endowed these folk with the possibility of success? What resources remained in the case of failure? What historical, cultural and psychological attributes permitted the various levels of attachment or divorce from Italy? And for contemporary Italian students, what remains of these attributes?
