CLIA-Cultura e Letteratura Italoamericana
Fall 2025
The Fall 2025 CLIA Course will be held by
Visiting Distinguished Professor
Professor Stanislao Pugliese
Queensboro Unico Distinguished Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies
Hofstra University
20 October-20 November 2025
In memoriam
Louise DeSalvo (1942-2018)
Francesco Durante (1952-2019)
Robert Viscusi (1941-2020)
“It was not really nationalism that he saw binding him to Italy. It was something less patriotic, but more deeply rooted. It was his connection to his village, the place of his birth, the sources of his energies and dreams. Although he had left it bodily, he could not replace it in spirit as his true home.”
-----Gay Talese, Unto the Sons (1992)
“A whole nation walked out of the Middle Ages, slept in the ocean, and awakened in New York in the twentieth century.”
-----Robert Viscusi, Astoria (1995)
“There was something I needed to capeshe here. My mother asked me why I was crying and all I could say was ‘It’s too beautiful. What the hand and the heart is capable of making.’”
-----Annie Lanzillotto, L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir (2013)
“Buy our books. Read our books. Write or be written.”
-----Italian American Writers Association
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 Mezzogiorno. 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, Uruguay, Canada and the United States. Between 1880 and 1924, millions of Italians went to the United States. 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.
These lectures 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 immigrant groups as well). The lectures 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 lectures 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 tell 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?
Some questions for students 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. 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 immigrants 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 estrangement from Italy? And for contemporary Italian students, what remains of these attributes? What can immigration history teach contemporary Italians about Italy itself?