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Seminar Series in Italian American Studies Thursday,
September 25, 2003: Jim
Burgwyn, West Chester University, “Italians and War Crimes in Yugoslavia,
1941-1943” This paper will discuss Italy's military
counterinsurgency program to counter the Yugoslav Partisan uprising
during the Italian occupation of the country during World War II. Thursday,
October 30, 2003: Franca Iacovetta, University of Toronto, on “Angelina Napolitano
and Virgilia D'Andrea: Workers’
Internationalism, First-Wave Feminism, and Two Defiant Italian Immigrant
Women in North America” This talk will consider how two intertwined international
movements helped to shape the lives of two defiant but starkly different
Italian immigrant women in early twentieth-century North America by examining
working-class immigrant Angelina Napolitano who faced the death penalty in
1911 Canada and anarchist, syndicalist and poet Virgilia D'Andrea. By drawing on a play based on the
Napolitano case and D'Andrea's poetry, Franca's talk will also offer some
comments on cultural writings and writing feminist and gendered histories of
working-class and radical immigrant women. Thursday,
November 13, 2003: Michael Miller Topp, University of Texas at El Paso, on “Dangerous
Politics: Why the Sacco and Vanzetti Case Still Matters” Although the
question of their guilt or innocence is still unresolved over 75 years after
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed, one thing remains
clear. Their identity – in both
ethnic and political terms – had a decisive impact on the conduct of their
trial and ultimately cost them their lives. Their case has enduring relevance because the danger it
exposed continues to exist – the danger that a frequently frightened society
will overreact to perceived threats. Thursday,
December 11, 2003: Peter
Carravetta, Queens College, on “Behind the Bollettino
dell'Emigrazione: Politics,
History, and Migration in Italy, 1886-1913” This
paper addresses the shaping of Italian national political debate from the
first defeat of the Italian colonial venture in Africa to the eve of World
War I, its interrelatedness to the growing migration problem, the debate on
how to account for the exodus, and the need for a specialized publication,
the Bollettino,
which could be used as a frame of reference for both parliamentary and public
press debates as Italy moved into the twentieth century. Slides will be shown. Thursday, February 19, 2004: Clarissa Clò, University of California
in San Diego, on "Living Newspapers and Circum-Atlantic Performance in
1930s New York" Clarissa
Clò will examine Italian
American and African American relations in New York during the 1930s from the
perspective of cultural productions created partially in response to
international events, such as the Italo-Ethiopian War. Clo' will explore the Federal Theatre
Project's censored "living newspaper" "Ethiopia" and
Orson Welles's Harlem production of "Macbeth" in relation to the
performative aspects of the Italian immigrant press and theatre. She will discuss how these
productions are part of and enabled by a larger transoceanic cultural context
of encounter, conflict, and mutual, but not necessarily equal, exchange. Thursday, March 25, 2004: Laura Biagi,
New York University, on “The Revival of Ritual and Performance in Italy: The
Example of Tarantella and Tarantismo” In
the 1960s and 1970s, the folk revival movement in Italy involved literature,
cinema, music, and dance. It was a mirror of the socio-political
transformations of the country since the end of World War II, and it
translated politics into performance. In this talk, Ph.D. candidate Laura
Biagi gives a general overview of the movement and the first and second
waves of revival in Salento (1970s-90s), focusing particularly on the
example of local tarantella and tarantismo Thursday, April 22, 2004: Dominique Padurano, Rutgers
University-New Brunswick, on ""From Angelo to Atlas, or How a
97-Pound (Italian) Weakling Became the All-American Working-Class
Male."" Using
photographs, advertisements, and other texts from popular culture sources,
Ph.D. candidate Dominique Padurano will trace the ways in which Angelo
Siciliano, born in Calabria in 1893, transformed himself into Charles Atlas,
bodybuilder and icon of twentieth-century American masculinity, as well as
how he created a pan-ethnic coalition of working-class boys and men from the
1930s-50s. Friday,
May 14, 2004
"Italian/American Cultural Criticism: The State of the Art" Anthony
Julian Tamburri, Florida Atlantic University The past thirty years, especially, constitute a fertile
period of any sort of cultural, critical discourse with the advent of Rose
Basile Green's study of the Italian/American novel. Until then, we could find
a number of essays/reviews published sporadically, but no one had yet
articulated a sustained discourse of this sort. Since the publication of
Green's study, we have witnessed an admirable number of sustained essays,
though some seem a bit premature. This talk will address the current state of
Italian/American critical discourse and how it interrogates the cultural
productions of Italian America. The Calandra Institute
Seminar Series in Italian American Studies was established in 1996 by
Distinguished Professor Philip V. Cannistraro * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * Lectures begin at
6:30 PM - Calandra Institute, 25 W. 43rd St. (between 5th & 6th Avenues), 17th floor, in
Manhattan. Call (212) 642-2042 for further information. Seating
is limited. The Calandra Institute is a university
institute under the aegis of Queens College. [Return to the Academic & Cultural Programs page.] |
