16 June • Marta Petrusewicz
“Italian Diasporas and the Multiplicity of Belonging”
Italians, Donna Gabaccia once wrote, are “among the most migratory of peoples on earth.” Italian diasporas were many, over eight centuries, to all places of the world—other European countries, North and South America, Africa, Australia. The question this lecture will address is: what kind of identity does diaspora breed?
The question of diaspora is bound to movement and its narration, but in an aberrant way. While a narration of movement is made of departure, passage, and arrival, diaspora has a dynamics of non-belonging, multiple-belonging, and the in-between. The question of diaspora is inseparable from the question of how to move, how to make one's way, in contexts in which one must negotiate the impossibilities of belonging.
Historically, Italians have lacked a common culture, language, and government. Those who emigrated carried with them regional, municipal and village identities that would always trump any unifying concept of nationhood. What happened with those identities in the new destinations? Did they merge with new “national” belongings? And to which nations? How is the multiplicity of experiences accommodated in historical, sociological and literary narratives?
Marta Petrusewicz, native of Warsaw, has studied in Poland, Italy, France and the United States. After three decades of teaching at Harvard, Priceton and CUNY, she has recently accepted a chair in Modern European History at the Università della Calabria. She is the author, among others, of Latifundium: Moral Economy and Material Life in a 19th-Century Periphery; Un sogno irlandese: la storia di Constance Markiewicz comandante dell’IRA and Come il Meridione divenne Questione: rappresentazioni del Sud prima e dopo il 1848. She is the editor, with Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider of Sud: conoscere, capire, cambiare; and, with Giovanna de Sensi, of Unità multiple: Centocinquant’anni? Unità? Italia? She is currently writing a comparative history of the European peripheries in the 19th century.
18 June • William Papaleo
“Returning to the Source: Identity and Art”
A s a new immigrant, an example of the most recent Italian American or American Italian diaspora, my artistic research brought me to Italy for cultural rather than economic reasons. Representative of a generation that is searching a more profound sense of heritage and roots in historic and modern Italy, I hope to offer a unique Italian American vision of Italy, devoid of nostalgia, value judgments, sentimental illusion or stereotypes.
This presentation consists of a power-point display of examples of 20 years of paintings inspired by the Campania region.
Rosso Ruggine. The Shipyards, work and the city, a New Yorker paints Castellamare di Stabia, was a commissioned show of the workers and shipyard environment that has been the heart and life of that city.
Immigrants in the new Italy. Various works inspired from the various ethnic groups that are integrating with difficulty into Italy and the correlation with Italian immigrants in America and the dilemma of integration, immigration and emigration that has been experienced.
Cityscapes/landscapes. Naples as street theater, both melting pot and provincial, pagan and Christian mysticism. The images that will be discussed were inspired from the paradoxes of a city that defies easy definition.
Campania landscapes. Cilento and Amalfi coast landscapes that elaborate why Italy has always attracted foreign painters. How I found the magic realism I could identify with.
William Papaleo is an American artist who has lived and worked in Italy for over 20 years. He teaches a multimedia course of languge and art at the University of Salerno. Papaleo studied with Robert Beverly Hale at the Art Students League, New York City, and Henry Hensche at the Cape School of Art in Massachusetts. In Italy he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Napoli, and worked on church fresco technique with Antonio Montagna in Piemonte. His paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries in Europe and the United States. He has received various awards in international and juried shows in Italy and America. He has taught painting at the University of California, Laverne in Naples and at the Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro, Massachusetts. He has collaborated with The Royal College of Art of London and The University HDM of Stuttgart, Germany during a series of international painting and multimedia workshops for European college students.
24 June • Stefano Luconi
“Transnationalism in Institutional Politics and the Italian Diaspora in the United States”
In the last few years, diaspora studies have progressively emphasized the political dimension of transnationalism. While this approach has drawn and focused on the experience of current immigrant groups, such as the Hispanics in present-day United States, this conceptual framework can be tentatively referred to other ethnic minorities in U.S. societies, including Italian Americans, even if the climax of the latter’s mass tides dates back to about a century ago.
Within this context, my presentation will address primarily two issues. On the one hand, it will reconstruct Italian Americans’ efforts to operate as a political lobby and to influence U.S. foreign policy to the benefit of their ancestral country by resorting to their actual or alleged clout at the polls in the eyes of the receiving country’s legislators and government officials. On the other, it will examine Italian Americans’ endeavors to shape the outcome of Italy’s parliamentary elections by either mobilizing voters in their ancestral land or, more recently, casting their own ballots by mail. Covering a time frame spanning from the end of World War I to the dawn of the twenty-first century, the presentation will also highlight the decline in the diaspora’s transnational involvement in Italian politics in the last few years.
Stefano Luconi teaches U.S. history at the University of Padua in Italy and specializes in Italian immigration in the United States. His books include From Paesani to White Ethnics: The Italian Experience in Philadelphia (2001); Little Italies e New Deal (2002); The Italian-American Vote in Providence, Rhode Island, 1916-1948 (2004); Dalle piantagioni allo studio ovale: L’inserimento degli afro-americani nella politica statunitense (2013). He also edited, with Dennis Barone, Small Towns, Big Cities: The Urban Experience of Italian Americans (2010).
2 July • Cristina Lombardi-Diop
“Beyond the Mediterranean: Voices and Discourses from the Southern Front”
From 1988 to 2008, according to Fortress Europe, at least 14,921 people died along the European frontiers, among whom 10,925 migrants crossing the Mediterranean sea towards Italy and the Atlantic Ocean towards Spain, and 1,691 people while trying to cross the Sahara desert in order to reach Europe. Since 2008, these figures have tragically increased exponentially. This epochal loss of humanity is in many ways inexplicable if approached exclusively from an economic or sociological perspective, or from the perspective of the Northern front.
My lecture proposes to look at this phenomenon through a different lens, one that takes into account the cultural and religious worldview of the migrants. The Mediterranean is thus observed from its Southern front. From this perspective, one begins to identify new discursive categories and new epistemologies that serve to recognize larger diasporic configurations.
There is a fervid popular imagination around the event of departure to Europe across the desert and sea for West African migrants. My lecture will explore the rich proliferation of popular images and cultural production (including a film by Franco-Senegalese director Idrissa Guiro, the music by Senegalese rapper Awadi; the murals that appear in the fishing village of Thiaroye-sur-Mer where many migrants depart from; a series of novels published in Italian narrating the Mediterranean crossing, etc.) which identify the Mediterranean as a space of sacred crossing. In particular, the lecture will focus on the concept of ‘Barça or Barzakh’ a sentence that recurs in films, hip-hop music, wall murals, and can loosely be translated as Barcelone or Death. This sentence has become a slogan for the movement across the Mediterranean between Senegal and Europe. It summarizes the idea that the alternative to life in Barcelone (and therefore Europe) is only death. By interpreting this concept as it appears in the Koran, I will argue that barzakh in “Barça au Barzakh” could be understood as a liminal space of passage from one state to the next, that is, from life in Africa for another life beyond the Mediterranean. In this sense, the Mediterranean becomes a sacred space that offers transcendental value to the experience of its crossing, one that is indeed deadly for many, yet ripe with a sacred promise.
By adopting this critical lens, my aim is to provide an interpretative framework for understanding the deadly event of the Mediterranean crossing—what most analysts understand as an irrational and desperate act. Once understood from this angle, this act presents instead existential and mystical implications that could ultimately restore some sense of agency and dignity to the many Mediterranean dead.
Christina Lombardi-Diop is the Director of the Rome Studies Program at Loyola University, Chicago, and holds a joint appointment in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department, and the Women's Studies and Gender Studies Program. She has taught at the American University of Rome (2001-2008), Northwestern University (2008-2010) and the University of California, Berkeley (2011). Cristina is the recipient of numerous scholarly prizes (among which the Nonino Prize and the Prize of the American Association for Italian Studies). In 2014 she was nominated as finalist for the Premio di Divulgazione Scientifica awarded by the Italian Book Association. Her essays on white femininity and colonialism, Italian migrations, and African Italian diasporic literature, have appeared in a variety of edited volumes and journals. Among her most recent publications are the edited volume Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (with Caterina Romeo, Palgrave, 2012) and the co-authored volume Bianco e nero. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani, with Gaia Giuliani (Le Monnier-Mondadori, 2013).