2008-2009

The Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in Italian American Studies

Thursday, September 18, 2008

The Intrepid Giuseppe Pitrè and his Collection of Sicilian Folk Tales

Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota, and Joseph Russo, Haverford College

The true treasures of European folklore are buried not in Germany, but in Sicily, and the greatest European folklorist of the nineteenth century was Giuseppe Pitrè (1841-1916). Pitrè was born into a family of fishermen in Palermo and became a medical doctor, councilman, and professor. He wrote over forty books and collected hundreds of fairy tales, legends, anecdotes, riddles, and myths and published them in Sicilian dialect. Indeed, his collection is the most important nineteenth-century collection of tales in dialect. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo translated the tales and edited a two volume collection The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè (Routledge, 2008). They will discuss the significance of Pitrè’s life and works, and read from the collection.

Monday, October 20, 2008

From “Terrone” to “Extra-comunitario”: The Evolution of Racism in Italian Cinema

Grace Russo Bullaro (Lehman College)

In films of the New Italian Cinema such as Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960), and Ciao, Professore! (1992), the “Southern question” takes on the cast of racism, with racial and cultural differences often overlapping. After the watershed years of the 1980s and 1990s, the discourse on racial identity and new definitions of ethnicity became full-blown with a spate of films that explored and redefined the boundaries of culture, ethnicity and otherness. What does it mean to be “Italian” in today’s multicultural Italy? This presentation will provide an overview of the current “migration cinema,” tracing the evolution of the discourse of “racism” from the 1950s to the current wave of films by directors such as Gianni Amelio, Carlo Mazzacurati, Francesco Munzi, and Ferzan Ozpetek.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Magic in the Mezzogiorno: The Anthropology of Ernesto De Martino

Dorothy Louise Zinn (Università degli Studi della Basilicata)

Ernesto De Martino (1908-1965) is widely acknowledged to be a founding figure of cultural anthropology in Italy, and yet his work remains almost entirely unknown in English-speaking countries. A brilliant and eclectic thinker, De Martino conducted several research expeditions in Southern Italy and the ethnographies he wrote remain classic works in Italian humanities. Employing a multidisciplinary perspective, De Martino’s approach to potions and healing charms, and the dancing frenzy induced by the bite of the Apulian taranta, embraced religious history, folklore, ethnopsychiatry, and ethnomusicology. Anthropologist Dorothy Louise Zinn, who translated and annotated De Martino’s The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism (Free Association, 2005), will discuss his research on the magical world of Southern Italian peasantry.

Monday, December 8, 2008

Italy Today: Facing the Challenges of the New Millennium

Mario B. Mignone (Stony Brook University)

Based on his book Italy Today: Facing the Challenges of the New Millennium (Peter Lang, 2007), Mario Mignone will present on post-World War II Italy to address the revolutionary years of the1970s and 1980s and the complexities of a postindustrial nation. How is Italy negotiating the challenges created by industrial, economic, and cultural globalization? The presentation will place special emphasis on discussing immigration to Italy and its impact on the country’s economy, politics, and culture.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 6 p.m.
Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad
Mark Choate, Brigham Young University

Between 1880 and 1915, thirteen million Italians left their homeland, launching the largest emigration from any country in recorded world history. As the newly-created Italian state struggled to adapt to the exodus, it pioneered the establishment of a “global nation,” an Italy abroad cemented by ties of culture, religion, ethnicity, and economics. Lasting ties between the Italian homeland and “Little Italies” were established to the benefit of both. Mark Choate, author of Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Harvard University Press, 2008), will discuss the importance of mass emigration in the development of the Italian nation-state and that history’s relevance to current debates over international migration.
Podcast available

Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 6 p.m.
The Crescent City Lynchings:Reconstructing the 1891 New Orleans Lynching
Tom Smith

After a sensational trial, eleven Italian Americans acquitted in the murder of New Orleans police chief David Hennessy were killed in the largest group lynching in American history. The 1891 incident caused an international diplomatic conflict, heightened the association of the word “mafia” with Italian immigrants, and remains one of the most traumatic episodes in Italian-American history. Initially, Hennessy was described as a victim of murderous Italian thugs. Recent scholarship, instead, has redefined the accused as victims of a wide-spread government conspiracy to expel the city’s Italian immigrants who were perceived as an economic and political threat. Tom Smith, author of The Crescent City Lynchings: The Murder of Chief Hennessy, the New Orleans “Mafia” Trials, and the Parish Prison Mob (Lyons Press, 2007), will explore the contending historical views of this lynching and to establish a narrative of politics, racism, and violence.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009, 6 p.m.
“Fade to White”: Colonial Mulattoes in Cinema and Literature of Fascist Italy
Rosetta Giuliani-Caponetto, University of Connecticut

In 2006, Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi proclaimed, “We don’t want Italy to become a multiethnic, multicultural country. We are proud of our traditions.” The current anti-immigrant sentiment in Italy and the popular perception of Italian society as homogeneously white must be examined in relation to the Fascist era’s obsession with racial purity.  Ethnic, racial, and cultural crossings during Mussolini’s regime were marked by cinematic and literary efforts to deny this social reality. Rosetta Giuliani-Caponetto will discuss the perceived threat and representations of biracial children of Italian men and African women from Italian colonies as found in 1930s popular novels and feature films.

Monday, May 18, 2008, 6 p.m.
Italian Divas in American Film: Changing Images of Italian Womanhood
Vera Dika, New Jersey City University

The image of Italian-American women has changed over the course of film history.  In American film, this female character is often presented as intimately linked to the gangster figure.  In Italian cinema, on the other hand, depictions of women are considerably more varied and complex. During the 1950s and 1960s Italian actresses Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren redefined the cinematic representation of Italian-American women by starring and wining Academy Awards for their performances in American films. Vera Dika will examine the work of five actors – Anne Dvorak in Scarface (1932), Magnani in The Rose Tattoo (1955), Loren in Two Women (1962), and Annabella Sciorra and Isabella Rossellini in The Funeral (1996) – and discuss their embodiment of “Italianicity.”

Podcast available

Video available