Abstract
In this essay, I will illustrate the mission and the most significant innovative teaching activities promoted by the Italian Diaspora Studies Seminar, a research center founded in 2017 at the University of Calabria, where I work. The Seminar aims to promote scholarly research into the abovementioned fields while building educational programs inspired by them. In particular, we investigate the perspective of specific Italian transnationalism that identifies itself with the network of Italian diasporic literature disseminated worldwide. Our goal is not limited to research; we seek to pursue a proactive perspective. It is a fact that contemporary writers of Italian heritage are generally unaware of contemporary Italian writers and that many of them are not familiar even with the Italian canonical masterpieces from the past, and the same goes vice versa. For this reason, our mission is to create new bridges to fill these gaps. One of the purposes of the “Italian Diaspora Seminar” is the ambition to investigate the opportunity to create, both theoretically and pragmatically, an inclusive ground in which to detect and promote new connections among Italian, diasporic, and migrant Italian contemporary writers. Our goal is to reinforce a sense of community that will lay the foundations for the growth of inclusive, inter-dialoguing, and unified Italian transnational literature.
Keywords
Introduction
The debate on transnational Italian literature is recent and has been growing beyond Italian national borders. Over the last decade, scholars belonging to the academic sector of Italian Studies have increasingly faced the question of the Italian cultural sphere of influence in the world, supporting the idea that it has indeed spread far and wide. Some outstanding editorial initiatives testify to this, such as the Transnational Modern Languages and the Transnational Italian Cultures series by Liverpool University Press, in which volumes of great interest have been published, such as Burdett and Polezzi (2020) and Burdett et al. (2020). Other prominent initiatives include the University of Michigan's Transnational Italian Studies Working Group (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/tis/) and the H-net-diaspora blog (https: //networks.h -net.org/h-italiandiaspora). These research groups promote theoretical discussions on Italian Studies focused on perspectives of inclusiveness, interdialogicity, and interculturality, often associating them with transmediality from a comparative and transdisciplinary point of view, and paying great attention to visual media, especially cinema and television (Frassinelli et al., 2011). Such studies are primarily connected to intersectional hermeneutics and give prominence to Gender Studies, Diaspora Studies, Working-Class Studies, and to the study of so-named Black Italy, referring to the three famous levels proposed by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), namely gender, race, and class. A more occasional, yet particularly interesting, connection is that with Trauma Studies, which analyze literature concerning the major collective traumas of the contemporary age, as in Caruth (1996) and Ballengee and Kelman (2021). Another intersection is with the extensive debate on Global Studies and the one on the Global Novel, whose essential reference is Kirsh (2017). Stemming from the inheritance of Cultural Studies, this rich and growing field (D'Alessandro, 2021) should be more known among Italian scholars based in Italy, where, on the contrary, these discussions are still marginal. The debate on intersectionality, which is dominant in North America, is still emergent in Italy (Camilotti and Crivelli, 2017; Mongibelli and Russo, 2021; Romeo, 2018). The interests deriving from the perspective I just described are sporadic in the Italian Studies scholarly area within national borders. The need to overcome the boundaries of the academic Italian literature discipline, especially in its contemporary sector, is reported by Durante (2001, 2005), Ganeri (2020a), Marazzi (1997), and Martelli (1998).
The same peripherality also characterizes Italian Diaspora Studies, whose primary goal is to bring together research on Italian diaspora cultures – which until a short time ago were parceled out in different, separate geo-cultural subject matters – and Italian culture and literature, placing them into a renewed dialogue. In this essay, I will illustrate the mission and the most significant innovative teaching activities promoted by the Italian Diaspora Studies Seminar, a research center founded in 2017 at the University of Calabria, where I work. 1 The Seminar aims to promote scholarly research into the abovementioned fields while building educational programs inspired by them. In particular, we investigate the perspective of specific Italian transnationalism that identifies itself with the network of Italian diasporic literature disseminated worldwide. Our goal is not limited to research; we seek to pursue a proactive perspective. It is a fact that contemporary writers of Italian heritage are generally unaware of contemporary Italian writers and that many of them are not familiar even with the Italian canonical masterpieces from the past, and the same goes vice versa. For this reason, our mission is to create new bridges to fill these gaps. One of the purposes of the Italian Diaspora Studies Seminar is to investigate the opportunity to create, both theoretically and pragmatically, an inclusive ground in which to detect and promote new connections among Italian, diasporic, and migrant Italian contemporary writers. Our goal is to reinforce a sense of community that will lay the foundations for the growth of inclusive, inter-dialoguing, and unified Italian transnational literature.
I will start with a necessary premise. The Italian academic system is structured on defined and strictly delimited disciplines and specializations. The Contemporary Italian Literature national academic sector focuses on studying the literary history of United Italy. It is a nationally oriented field, not open to transmedia: cinema and media studies are considered as outliers to the discipline converging in what is known as Italianistica, which include only the Italian language and literature. The so-called Great Migration has been an enormously relevant phenomenon, directly influencing post-Unification national politics. Subsequent massive migratory flows have characterized Italian national history after the Unification, and these flows are still ongoing today, as a remarkable number of Italians, especially among those with higher education, are still forced to emigrate in search of more favorable working conditions (a number of them becoming university professors of Italian Studies around the world). If emigration was, and continues to be, a relevant issue in Italian modern and contemporary history, one would reasonably expect to find some testimonies of it in the history of Italian literature. Nonetheless, it has been systematically ignored by society at large and academia too, until very recently.
The frequency and the wide spatial extension of mobility made the Italian case unique and even avant-garde due to some specific traits of cosmopolitanism and transnationality that make it worthy of attention within a general history of contemporary diasporas (Gabaccia, 2000). The need to study the many ‘Italies’, and the presence of ‘Italians everywhere’ is today confirmed by many scholars (to name a few: Cinel, 1999; Gabaccia, 2005; Riccio, 2016) and is connected with the reflections on the establishment of new concepts of ‘Italianness’ (Scaffai and Valsangiacomo, 2018). Italians, for instance, have been among the most diasporic ethnic groups over the last two centuries, having gone all over the world and having settled everywhere with a recognizable village-based cultural system. Nonetheless, Italian diasporic writers are still excluded from the Italian literary canon.
Of course, the language issue is crucial, as is the role of translation, which has always been an integral part of the study of literature. Despite the presence of untranslatable elements, translation is an essential tool of World Literature, and especially in our global context, it must be placed at the core of all the inclusive research practices (Nergaard, 2021), although without forgetting that its function is considered political (Spivak, 2009) and even manipulative (Hermans, 1985). However, in the specific case of Transnational Italian Studies, what especially counts are the notions of interculture and of transculture, which involve the mixing of languages and cultural traits even in monolingual writers, sometimes in openly disclosed, sometimes in more subtle and hidden ways. These elements are not even limited to italophony. Diasporic writing is always cross-cultural, and as such, it poses specific problems in translation that have been widely researched in the extensive bibliography of Translation Studies and, for the specific case of the Italian language, for example, in the Journal of Italian Translation edited by Luigi Bonaffini.
Today, within the more general crisis of humanities and the teaching of literature, the field of Italian Studies traditionally understood finds itself in a very critical spot. Because of the decline of master narratives related to the concept of nation, it has been recognized that Italianistica is condemned to disappear if it does not renew itself, acquiring a new transnational and transcultural dimension (Ganeri, 2020b). A profound transformation of society and of anthropological and cognitive patterns of learning is occurring today. As a country with multiple weaknesses, Italy can positively embrace the changes only sometimes, and conservatism is still the prevalent attitude.
Concerning the literary evidence of its diaspora, for example, it is not only diasporic writers have been neglected in Italy, but also the testimonies of 19th- and 20th-century migrations sedimented in the pages of many canonical Italian writers, such as Aleramo, Capuana, De Amicis, Pascoli, Pirandello, Serao, Verga and, later, Alvaro, Carlo Levi, Sciascia, to name the most important ones (Paternostro, 2011). The reasons for this marginalization are complex and often accompanied by a sense of embarrassment and even contempt for the lower classes, teachers, scholars, and university professors tend to identify themselves with the upper classes. In general, even though almost always without having the corresponding economic status. Anti-Southern prejudices also weighed in this context, given that the hegemonic classes looked at the Italian expatriates, since the early-20th century, with a paternalistic gaze, mainly because they were largely from the impoverished Southern lower classes.
This complex set of premises and the stimuli offered by the growing international debate mentioned before constitute the background that stimulated the creation of the Italian Diaspora Studies Seminar in 2017. Since 2014, we had already been promoting a number of initiatives, which can be briefly summarized here.
During the academic year 2014–2015, an entire, nine-credit graduate course on Italian American culture and literature, was launched within the Master-of-Arts degree in Modern Philology, section Italian Studies, of the Department of Humanities. It was called Cultura e Letteratura italo-americana (Italian American Culture and Literature, also known as CLIA). Offered in English, it was taught in seminar style by several visiting professors from the United States and Canada, each teaching between one to three weeks. The course was offered once a year for four academic years, and each time it hosted a series of five-to-six visiting professors. After four editions, and following the establishment of the Seminar, the course has secured an agreement with the Fulbright organization to activate a Fulbright Lectureship. This is financed by the Italian Diaspora Studies Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Pittsburgh (PA, US). The application process is administered by the Fulbright committee that selects one winning candidate per year, awarding a grant to teach the entire course. Unfortunately, we had to suspend the Lectureship for two years due to the pandemic. It was restored in the academic year 2022–23, and it will run annually until 2025, with the possibility of renewal. 2
A second contribution to the growth of Italian American Studies in Italy took place in 2015. We organized an advanced three-week academic seminar, open to a selected number of postgraduate students and scholars. The Italian Diaspora Studies Summer Seminar had three editions at the University of Calabria as a collaborative program with the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of CUNY/Queens College of New York.
These initiatives have been groundbreaking for Italy. The CLIA course was the first, and still is only, course dedicated to Italian American culture and literature within the Italian public university system. Our Lectureship is the only one the Fulbright organization activated in the South of Italy and the only one dedicated to Italian American literature and culture in Italy. The summer seminar was the first the research institute of New York held outside the United States.
Despite the remarkable success of these initiatives, or maybe as a consequence, the founding group of the Italian Diaspora Studies Seminar started feeling the need to expand the focus of the scholarly investigations beyond the Italian American field. On the one hand, the need to look at other parts of the world outside the United States has become more urgent, on the other, our newly born research center had to be more centered on the study of Southern Italy and Calabria in the light of diaspora.
As a first step after the institution of the Seminar, we decided to organize a ten-day planning workshop, with invited participants selected among prominent scholars in the field coming from Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States. We had the goal of building an international scientific network and gathering and discussing ideas on developing new teaching programs.
Entitled The Future of Italian Diaspora Studies, the workshop was held at the University of Calabria on May 2018 3 and it marked the starting point of a kind of research that does not limit itself to Italian American Studies but encompasses the potentially borderless Italian Diaspora Studies. The ecumenic perspective we embraced brought us to develop new goals and outlines for our university courses and our new residential seminars.
Consequently, in 2019, we launched our first two-week Italian Diaspora Studies Writing Seminar: Heritage and Memory. 4 Being focused on creative writing, the seminar was not limited to academics. More importantly, it was a touring seminar, held in different locations in Northern Calabria and Basilicata, outside the walls of the university. We planned it as an experimental touring laboratory, where we intended to research the role of traveling as a dynamic identity factor and to analyze it in relation to the experience of traveling in the Italian South. The program was attended by a remarkably international group of participants from Australia, Canada, Ghana, Israel, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It included three workshops (two on creative writing and one on reading as a tool to write), plus seminars on different topics offered by guest speakers. All the classes were informed by the subjects of Cultural Heritage and Diasporic Memory.
On the side of scholarly events, such as the already mentioned workshops and seminars, plus a series of literary readings and film debates, we included a series of community activities organized with local institutions. We carefully prepared the settings of the Seminar with cultural associations and municipalities, and we carried out research of documentary material related to the specific territories chosen as the program's settings. In order to consider the experience of visiting Southern Italy as a factor that can deeply permeate both literary and scholarly writing, the organizing group worked to answer the following questions: 1) How and to what extent traveling in the South of Italy affects the self-perception of heritage for writers and scholars both Italian and of Italian origin? 2) How and how much a new vision of the complexity of historical and cultural issues tied with the South changes the vision of Italy and of Italian heritage? 3) Can this specific set of issues underscore a common ground for a transnational Italian literary community? We did not know then that among the people who enrolled in the Seminar there would have been participants with no Italian heritage. However, we verified during the program that addressing these issues also worked well for them.
After identifying the locations for the Seminar, the organizing group carried out proper research in situ, not only involving people and institutions but also identifying urban spaces and material resources, especially photographs related to the history of those territories, with particular attention, of course, to records of local migration. Because of the richness of the visual materials (primarily photographs, printed drawings, and video recordings), we decided to include photographing locations as a transmedia activity of the program, interacting with writing. University professor, poet, and photographer Mark Hillringhouse produced a series of high-quality photographs for the follow-up book we published one year after the Seminar (to which I will return later).
Within the framework of the Writing Seminar that was scheduled for May 2020, and was unfortunately canceled due to the pandemic, we planned to include a workshop taught by Mark Hillringhouse on photography and writing, where participants would have been asked to take photos and digital videos of Calabrian places and people. They were going to be prompted to produce these visual materials while at the same time reflecting on the ways the immersive experience was affecting their individual and collective identity's (self)perception and their writing. 5
The combination of visual and written materials and their publication online and in print could be helpful also for tourist promotion because it discloses little known travel routes which are, nevertheless, worthy of attention. From this perspective, the development of an international residential program in areas that have been impoverished by the weight of a long colonial process is always a form of concrete support for marginalized territories. Tourism promotion can be seen as a positive side effect of the mission of valuing the cultural heritage of the South, which remains underestimated, if not wholly unknown, both in Italy and abroad. The disclosure of an image of Calabria aiming not only at the potentialities of prevalent summer/beach tourism, but also at artistic and cultural destinations can make a positive impact on the realities of the region. This can occur precisely by suggesting travel destinations that are little known but extremely valuable from a historical, artistic, and anthropological point of view. Promoting diasporic tourism, even in the case of so-called root tourism, can have some significant social repercussions because it potentially overturns the anti-Southern prejudices, often internalized by outsiders and Southern people alike.
Overall, the structure of this program drew inspiration from the concept of experiential learning. The learning process acquired through writing had to be stimulated by the immersion – visual, audible, linguistic, culinary – in the places from which the diaspora began and where it has left many traces in the abandoned lands, towns, and buildings. Learning, debating, and writing were intended to happen during the visits to the places of the emigrants’ departures. We believed that this simultaneity would enhance the synergy of experiential learning, via an all-encompassing experience
We also included a Carlo Levi literary tour in our program: classroom readings from Christ Stopped in Eboli were followed, on the same day, by a field trip to Aliano, where Levi was confined, and then to Matera on the next day, culminating in a writing workshop about the visits and the effects produced by the readings from the novel. This literary tour was partly modeled on the one dedicated to the historical novel Umbertina (1979) by Helen Barolini, held in June 2017. The Umbertina Tour Project consisted of a one-day itinerary from the hometown of the novel's protagonist, Castagna (in the province of Catanzaro), in the so-called Sila piccola, passing through Soveria Mannelli and Cosenza, to end in Paola, a small city on the northern Tyrrhenian coast that was an important point of departure toward America. 6 However, including a creative writing workshop in the Carlo Levi Tour strengthened the active role of participants, enhancing their involvement and, therefore, their learning process.
To summarize, the philosophy that inspired the organization of our Seminar had a triple focus: 1) studying a series of Italian and Italo-diasporic contemporary texts as elements of a unified Italian transnational literature, while reflecting on the theoretical status of this category; 2) analyzing narratives and counter-narratives of the Italian South, starting from personal, family and collective memories, often conditioned by symbolic violence (Bourdieu), both within these texts and in the critical practice that interprets them; 3) contributing to creating both space and new materials within Italian transnational literature, thanks to the participants’ writings. When Maria Mazziotti Gillan, one of the most powerful figures of the Italian American poetry scene in the United States, besides conducting her workshop, felt inspired to write new poems dedicated to the areas of Calabria she was visiting for the first time, we felt we had fulfilled our goal. 7
By considering the experience of traveling as one that changes the travelers and reshapes their interior landscapes, the 2019 Writing Seminar allowed participants to be immersed in a platform of dialoguing, comparing, and networking with different Italian diasporas across the globe, while connecting them with regional spaces where the issues of past migration are still present today. Formal and informal talks animated a lively and engaging community, creating a pathway of experiential learning that stimulated scholarly research and literary creativity. The immersion in the villages and the local communities also offered encounters with the present-day reality of immigration and the new Italian multiculturalism. Teaching creative writing allows us not only to identify but also to deconstruct colonial narratives, using counter-narratives aimed at addressing the cultural richness of the Mezzogiorno by centering on the history of its proletarian classes and their material culture and craft traditions.
The 2019 Writing Seminar constitutes the model for other programs we organized, and for others to be realized in the near future. 8 I should add that the current transformation of Italy in the wake of recent waves of immigration is another phenomenon that our residential programs address. Furthermore, it is another aspect that permeates the shifting of identity and positionality in research contexts. The location of Calabria at the heart of the Mediterranean Sea is, in this sense, strategic. This sea represents both the real space and the iconic symbol of contemporary European migration flows, primarily from Africa and the Middle East. It is a lively, crisscrossed space of displacements of people and a mortal, boundless cemetery of immigrant dead bodies, with all that follows in terms of ambivalent symbolic dynamics of reception and expulsion. 9 As Sicily, Calabria is one of the most crowded entry points for clandestine migrants, and it is also a region where several well-known initiatives of hospitality have been set in motion. The world-famous case of Riace and the legal actions against its former mayor Domenico (Mimmo) Lucano, for example, are critical cases in the contemporary Italian political scenario.
In 2020 we started the publication of a bilingual book series with the same name as the Seminar, Italian Diaspora Studies, edited by Rubbettino. The first volume, Celebrating Calabria. Writing History and Memory, edited by Margherita Ganeri and Maria Mazziotti Gillan, is the follow-up book of the 2020 Writing Seminar. It includes selected writings (critical essays and a literary section with poems, short stories, excerpts from novels, and memoirs) and photographs by Mark Hillringhouse. The series has published three other books so far. The latest one, Calabrian Voices. Diaspora Stories from the Younger Generations, was edited by Steven J Sacco and Alessandra De Marco, and it came out in July 2022. This is a follow-up to two CLIA courses held during the pandemic. It contains an anthology of writings by the students that tell stories of emigration from their families and towns.
Like the 2019 Writing Seminar, the CLIA course, at least in its last two editions, also fulfilled not only the educational goal of pursuing a transnational perspective within contemporary Italian literature, but also the aspiration of adding a proactive authorial contribution to this literature. Calabrian Voices is a creative writing product that testifies to the transformation of students into authors as a consequence of having attended a graduate course on Italian American literature and culture. Their newly-acquired authorships bloomed from their learned capacity to become not simply readers but agents of the diasporic history of exploitation of Southern Italy, in general, and of Calabria in particular.
To conclude, at the core of the Italian Diaspora Studies Seminar teaching mission lies the centrality of the concept of belonging while changing. This is strongly tied with the sense of the importance of places, in a theoretical frame in which locations act as catalysts of experiencing and of shifting positionalities. Learners are considered protagonists, and the reinforcement of their agency is the ultimate goal of teaching. Teaching, in turn, is always conceived as a public engagement project.
In addition, the assumption of transnational perspectives entails ideas of inclusive community based on the individuation of shared interests among interlocutors disseminated across the global geopolitical space. These studies bring mutual benefits to all the dialoguing counterparts. If Italianità is an essential component of the diasporic identity, it is only the reciprocal exchange among its different variants that can bridge the gaps among the Italian cultures inside and outside Italy (and not only among those produced by the diaspora). From this point of view, the activities converging into transnational research always bring with them profound ethical intents: they cross theoretical (often self-referential) conceptualizations, necessarily pouring into the real space of society. In this regard, projects linked to territories are always heralds of social repercussions. In our specific case, connecting to the most marginalized territories of the Italian nation can strive to propose a model of civic education based on respect for alterities and diversities. This bond breaks the narratives based on monologic and hierarchic orders in favor of others, based on multiplicity, diversity, and inclusivity.
In other words, the Italian Diaspora Studies Seminar works to create specific educational contexts where encounters and confrontations among Italian, diasporic Italian, and migrant writers and scholars could function as situational locations, and where the questioning of dominant master narratives can produce an ethical advancement of knowledge. It tries to do so by proposing a teaching practice conceived not only as a way to create knowledge, but also as a way to stimulate literary production in transnational perspective.
