It’s Italian American Heritage Month! Get to know our Italian Studies journals to stay up to date on new research, book reviews, creative work, and more. Plus, check out a recommended recent article from each!
Diasporic Italy: Journal of the Italian American Studies Association is a scholarly, blind peer-reviewed journal devoted to the Italian American diaspora, focusing on timely and varied approaches to criticism and analysis of the field by presenting new perspectives and research on transnational issues. Interdisciplinary in nature, Diasporic Italy publishes on all aspects of the arts, humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies, and is particularly interested in comparative studies, pedagogy, and translation.
Recommended Reading: “The Self We Save: Interview with Theresa Carilli, May 2021” by Colleen M. Ryan (Vol. 3)
What is Italian theater in the US today and how did we get here? Where and how can I find the scripts, immerse myself in the art, and understand this rich piece of America’s ethnic history? Greatly inspired by Theresa Carilli’s special volume, her plays, short stories, and numerous works on representations of women and queer/LGBTQ+ communities in film and media, this interview is a conversation about her family, education, gender, and ethnicity, about her sexuality, and about her playwriting, teaching, and healing.
The Italian American Review, an interdisciplinary, bi-annual, peer-reviewed journal of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, publishes scholarly articles about the history and culture of Italian Americans, as well as other aspects of the Italian diaspora. The journal embraces a wide range of professional concerns and theoretical orientations in the social sciences and in cultural studies. It entertains articles about such topics as migration, politics, labor, race and ethnicity, urban studies, gender studies, literary criticism, as well as various forms of cultural production (religious feasts, cinema, music, etc.), especially those addressing societal aspects.
Recommended Reading: “Consuming Italian: Transatlantic Actors and Infrastructures of Italian Exports to Postwar America, 1957–1962” by Giulia Crisanti (Vol. 14, Iss. 1)
What degree of success did the discussed actors, infrastructures, and products achieve in promoting Made in Italy in the US and in encouraging Americans to consume Italian? The very emphasis on the quality advantage of Italian products mirrored and compensated for Italian exports’ inability to compete with American mass production and to gain a mass market. The growing conviction was that, in order to extend Italy’s commercial presence in the United States, Italian products and models had to be adapted to the characteristics and requests of the Americans. Although the Italianization of American society never reached the scope, influence, or impact of the Americanization of postwar Italy, the two processes were anything but different or unrelated.
Italian Americana is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal dedicated to exploring the Italian emigrant/immigrant experience through both scholarly and creative works. Its mission is to publish scholarly and creative works that explore the topic of Italian Americanness from a wide variety of perspectives. Italian Americana maintains its long tradition of printing innovative articles by historians, social scientists, literary critics, and visual artists, among others, as well as presenting original works of fiction, poetry, and memoir.
Recommended Reading: “Following Calvino” by Joe De Quattro (Vol. XLII, Iss. 1-2)
Internationally recognized as a journalist, short-story writer, and novelist who made a huge impact on the postmodernist movement of the twentieth century, Calvino is known for the diversity of his works, including whimsical and imaginative fables, neorealistic novels, and probing essays on scientific and literary themes. Joe De Quattro’s work of short fiction, “Following Calvino,” imagines an encounter with Calvino in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1985, when the Italian writer was scheduled to begin a term of the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard University; tragically Calvino died just weeks before he was scheduled to depart.
Italica features original scholarly articles on all aspects of Italian language, literature, and culture as well as studies on language pedagogy. Interdisciplinary and comparative studies related to Italian literary and intellectual culture are also accepted. The journal serves members of the American Association of Teachers of Italian (AATI) and other readers interested in things Italian through the publication of reviews, announcements, and bibliographies.
BONUS ARTICLE
Journal of American Ethnic History
The Journal of American Ethnic History addresses various aspects of North American immigration history and American ethnic history, including background of emigration, ethnic and racial groups, Native Americans, race and ethnic relations, immigration policies, and the processes of incorporation, integration, and acculturation. It is the official journal of the Immigration & Ethnic History Society.
A close reading of articles published in Progressive Era magazines in Italian and English, and direct appeals for settlement to the Italian ambassador in Washington, demonstrate how proposals to colonize Italians in the American South shaped the debate over desirability in a period grappling with policy solutions, both in Italy and the United States, to an emerging immigration problem. Race and the immigration problem intersected powerfully in the Progressive Era South in unusual ways as colonizationists adopted their own definitions of racial desirability that centered white southerners’ economic needs.
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