Ethnicity and Its Discontent:

    Reading Italians in Multicultural   

    Societies

 

The more successful one is commodifying oneself, the less one is able to repro­duce the self that has been commodified. — Micaela di Leonardo “White Ethnic­ities, Identity Politics, and Baby Bear’s Chairs”

 

Within the international purview of Italian Studies, when we speak of ethnicity, we unfailingly think of the literary corpus re­garding la diaspora italiana, a body that seems to reside in pro­longed academic limbo. Despite the commendable efforts of some scholars in their attempt to organize and define ‘ethnic discourse,’ when we speak of Italo-American, Italo-Canadian or Italo-Austra­lian literature we are still somewhat unsure, perplexed even, as to the legitimacy of a critical inquiry involving questions of ethnicity within Italian Studies, that has long remained a field that does not fully appreciate the diversity of articulations arising from the phe­nomenon of diaspora, in relation to the national discourse, and therefore has entrusted all that is within the Italian trans-cultural ambit to historiography and demographic statistics. To date, the interpretation of diasporic experience, in its symbolic aspect, has been left to the goodwill of those directly involved and who, peri­odically, were too close to the facts to be able to discern the ambi­guities. It is not surprising that where such hybridity develops, one still encounters allusions to an ‘Italian Legacy’ as in the man­ner of the illustrious references to Dante, Michelangelo or Bo­dakelly (better known as Botticelli), as Anthony Tamburri com­plains in various articles on the matter.

The general growth of interest in ethnicity within Italian Stud­ies departments further accentuates the need to shed new light on ethnic discourse and on the subsequent literary questions. It is therefore necessary to broaden the understanding of the meaning of such literary works, by means of critical analysis, with the ex­pectation that such discussions will go beyond the historiographi­cal interpretations that have characterized this cultural subject, especially beyond Italian regionalism that has often served to augment these inquiries but may have, in the final analysis, hin­dered further critical scrutiny. Above all, the elements of individ­ual italianità uncovered in this narrative legitimize a widening of such discussions by taking into consideration the political-cultural dynamics, which epitomize ethnic discourse, in relation to the evo­lution of social discourse. In order to clarify my comments, which naturally do not intend to denigrate any previous work, I will say, however, that discussion on the topic may be formulated dialectically, in so far as the emergence of new cultural formations are definitive of the contemporary era, and which, in my opinion, parallel social and historical transitions. Perceptively, it will be possible to interpret works that involve issues of Italian ethnicity not as either faithful or faithless to the traditional national culture (indeed, one would ask oneself, with which traditional Italian cul­ture might one identify) but rather as referents to many contrasts and contradictions surrounding the development of that culture. Keeping this in mind, we see, for example, that ethnicity can be marketed and as a commodity it is aimed, for the most part, at tourists, and here one thinks of the revival of the Little Italys in major metropolitan areas. The relationship between commercial commodities and ethnic cultural production, with particular refer­ence to the recent literary research of texts, written by immigrants, expatriates and exiles, represents the effort to identify this phe­nomenon as the result of the cultural and social mutation, more obvious and urgent in the modern era than ever before. Cultural and ethnic studies, partly stimulated by widespread post-colonial inquiry, signify the recuperation of culture as social practice rather than aesthetic practice and, consequently, we find ourselves redis­covering everything that up to now had been considered periph­eral to the dominant culture. Without making any value judgments, this rediscovery may contribute, in part, to an under­standing of the articulations on which one bases the negotiation between dominant culture and mass culture, that is to say be­tween cultural conventions and the perception of those conven­tions.

Certainly, Italian literary production should not be classified by the same standards of the post-colonial discourse as that of literary works of francophone or anglophone countries and this frailty contributes to a certain resistance in accrediting political value to the Italian migratory phenomenon, much less its social and liter­ary value. The lack of direct colonial experience, in the classic sense of the word, and by this I mean, experience in being bound to systems of foreign domination since the communities of Italians beyond their own shores were never fully the subject of discrimi­nation conceptually bound with ‘race,’[1] means that discussion on Italian immigration has been left to the margins, favoring research of less problematic theory. We can accept this argument in its general terms, yet it is unwise to ignore in-depth inquiry due to certain obstacles facing those who are prepared to study, critically, the narrative arguments of works produced outside the established confines. For instance, we may remember, hidden within the broad and bandied-about term, multicul­turalism, lay numerous red herrings, the foremost being an under­estimation of its political theme and connotations, such as power alliances. A fundamental study should be both critical to and attentive of the so-called politics of identity and from which the Italian migrant community is not completely absent. The ethnic literary production, characterized by its strong historical, economic and ideological connotations, can be instrumental in situating the ethnic element in order to interpret the postmodern subject. In Italian studies at this time, the ethnic self seems to be vacillating between the myths of origin with the related ‘meta­physics’ and the internal proliferation of ethnic consciousness, which Aijaz Ahmad calls, in a polemic tone that opposes a certain ethnic postmodern intelligentsia, ‘excessive belonging.’ This suggests that ethnic identity may be read as being an epistemic unity of the postmodern era and one may study it in terms of cognitive science or of economics. For precisely this reason, novels such as Benedetta in Guysterland by Giose Rimanelli, set in the USA or Paese Fortunato by Rosa Capiello, set in Australia, to name only two, serve to remind us that the contemporary authors of Italian origin are not only an integral part of the ethnic discourse in their respective countries but further emphasize, through their distinct semiosis, that Italian-based narrative discussion must include ethnic Italian works as a sign of the diverse temporality that characterizes the modern and postmodern eras. Having said this, it is not so much that a regulated literary community exists to legitimize the ethnic Italian discourse but, by necessity, one must take advantage of these works in order to uncover the phantoms of the Italian hybrid’s nostalgia and to demystify that community’s politics, where ‘belonging’ to the widespread albeit vague notion of multiculturalism often conceals a disturbingly conservative position.

Two important elements hereby warrant particular considera­tion. In the last twenty years, the academic profession has wit­nessed the progressive enlargement of an intellectual base that produces transcultural literary works, by which I refer to the quantity of university professors who are also poets and writers. Concurrently, ethnographic and anthropological studies appear to have shifted their attention to the narratological aspect in which research is reported more so that the epistemological aspect, as recognized by Clifford Geetz among others, in the debate on the participation and position of the subject in relation to the object. Given this, I wish to present a case that illustrates how inversion of this tendency has an effect on Italian ethno-literary studies. I shall refer briefly to the social anthropological research by Miceala di Leonardo, entitled The Varieties of Ethnic Experience. In this study she examines the framework of American social classes and their transformations in relation to the concept of the ethnic com­munity. Here, di Leonardo takes the Italian community and its forms of integration into the American social fabric into considera­tion, in regards to the creation of so-called ‘white ethnicity.’ Emerging from this study are those same contentions to which ethnic Italian literature seeks a response. The overriding concern of di Leonardo’s research seems to be the methodological princi­ple, that is, the approach of a normative analysis, which describes and prescribes certain ethnic characteristics, to an investigation that observes the various correlations between individual identity and collective identity in an environment of different historical and economic contexts. The study of Italo-American residents in California, for example, reveals that the cultural process crucial for the comprehension of what constitutes ethnicity is more greatly influenced by economic factors that determine the mobility and assimilation in the social environment than by the ethnic or mythological characteristics with which Italians had been previ­ously described. In this way, certain distinctive and ritual ele­ments are used as commodities. One may think of the stereotypi­cal equation between Italians and food. In other words, ethnic symbols are constantly manipulated within the ethnic community to determine social behavior in a given location. Ethnicity, then, is seen as a term in constant fluctuation and subordinated to internal negotiation. In particular, it is interesting to examine the Seventies, a period that coincided with the rediscovery of ethnic pride and values. In those years, the class changes in American society seem to have been determined more by adhesion to family behavior than by differential factors of integration by ethnic groups into American capitalism. It is not by accident, that the emergence of white ethnic culture paralleled the politics of the silent majority who were able to manipulate the ‘battle-lines’ for the purpose of blocking the minorities opposed to Nixon’s reactionary admini­stration. This silent majority, for the most part, was composed of whites, that is the ethnic groups of southern European origin: male, employed, patriotic and who were the traditional heads of family in which the wife remained at home and the children were raised under strict family supervision. These new white ethnics were model citizens maintaining neighborhood stability yet at the same time, retaining their own character. They owned restaurants, ethnic specialty shops, and other similar establishments where the women were relegated to kitchen and domestic duties. This fe­male role was used, in particular, to reinforce the sense of ethnic identity within the Italian community, indeed, it became a type of sacrificial model fundamental in the construction of Italian cul­tural identity. Concurrently, within the urban settlements, the gen­trification of the area raised property values thus creating prob­lems of contrast and conflict between black and white communities.

It is interesting to note that in many academic environments the term ‘identity’ has utterly eclipsed ‘ideology’ and, for this reason, has become the basis for dispute in political discourse. In as much as ethnic identity assumes an infinite array of forms and variances, it is quite difficult to define their authenticity and, consequently, their authority. In this sense, whatever the discourse on identity, it is merely the product of an historic dispute; one which puts for­ward an answer in response to oppression on the part of whom­ever wishes to maintain or retain authority and power. It is worthwhile asking of today, what are the motives lying behind a rediscovery of the values of Italian ethnicity? It could be said that a reinterpretation seeks to transport the entire Italian ethnic discourse from a less essentialist level to a post-colonial pedagogy, thus to the creation of a curriculum of cultural studies that anticipates the construction of a culture of ‘resistance.’[2] It is, in my opinion, paramount to situate Italian discourse within the actual debate between modernism and postmodernism that, more precisely, is in the discussion of values such as those of community in regards to metaphysical presence through a solid concept of subjectivity and identity. I shall return to this point in due course, reflecting upon some contradictions that emerge within two ethnic literary examples, however, prior to this, I wish to clarify my argument.

In From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana, one of the most recent collections of prose, poetry, and critical essays edited by Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo Giordano, and Fred Gar­daphé, we find that the term italianità indicates the works of Italo-American writers that contain elements attributable to their Italian roots. The term itself nevertheless remains rather mysterious ac­cording to the editors of the anthology. The ambiguity, at times, seems to stem from the confusion in which one seeks to pinpoint elements that constitute a cultural and national identity. This con­fusion is not so much of those who collect the works but for those who find themselves directly, yet unwilling, involved in such questions. For a number of authors, there is a strange uneasiness between the conscious hold of a certain ethnic peculiarity (see Sandra Gilbert) and a rejection of it, as in the case of Gilbert Sor­rentino, or to situations of mythomania, typical of New World pioneering spirit, as highlighted by Robert Viscusi, in the anthol­ogy cited above. Moreover, it seems evident that the ambiguity stems from the driving necessity to recognize an authentic ethnic­ity and whether it be marginally or centrally positioned, according to its specificity. On this point, it must be remembered that dis­course on ethnicity always refers to some form of the rhetoric of origins or, as Fredrich Jameson accurately reveals, to some alle­gorical form of the nation. How should one disentangle oneself in order to distinguish what to abandon and what to retain as solid cultural references? Social anthropology helps us by elongating the spectrum of possibility in reading the dynamics with which we define the ethnicity of a community. Indeed, it should not be disregarded that even a study describing group or community stereotypes can assist in the understanding of how such stereo­types are conceptually constructed and how they are often seen to produce a certain empirical confirmation.

In the literature, at least, the problem seems to be the location of the Italian diasporic discourse as an alternative to or a deriva­tion from the dominant national discourse. A primary solution to the problem would be to relegate the discourse, in its entirety, to a question of genre. As William Boelhower’s study, “The Immigrant Novel as a Genre” suggests, that is to delineate the literature of immigration as a literary genre with its own semantic autonomy. He refers at length to the construction or reconstruction of cultural identity through autobiography and Bildungsroman. While accord­ing praise to Boelhower who has identified and legitimized an ethnic semiosis traditionally relegated to pre-aesthetic status, due to its supposed lack of literary autonomy, some clarifications are necessary. Even though it is possible to identify a ‘fiction’ of iden­tity, it is equally important to clarify that éthnos does not simply evoke an imaginary recourse to an idealized community, mani­fested in the signifying structure of the narrative of immigration. It is precisely because this narrative is typified by an extremely complex and conflicting contextuality that it needs to cleanse it­self, so to speak, of the trans-historic ambiguity or hybridity by which popular culture is often defined. It must be historically re-situated. It is insufficient to limit the dynamics of articulations with which the ethnic narrative is formed to an aesthetic examina­tion. The rhetoric of cultural identity has its own dialectic value above and beyond the literary one.

In his famous work, Orientalism, Edward Said suggests that the bulk of western literary culture has been written by exiles and immigrants and by those who find themselves in a situation of implied separation from the national public sphere. According to Said, distance produces a critical ‘double vision,’ an understand­ing that commits those who are removed to see with an historical consciousness, different to those within the homeland. Conse­quently, we speak of re-positioning migrant discourse within the field of Italian studies, re-orientating the critical view toward that which was traditionally considered marginal. We are now able to refocus on the Italian literary situation in regards to extra-national production. In particular, one might say that through the analysis of marginalized narrative discourse it is possible to reorganize the cultural debate opened, many years ago, by Antonio Gramsci on the modality and the forms of hegemony and counter-hegemony in Italian culture. Toward the argument concerning the literature of immigration, there is an obligation to consider in great detail, the relationship between cultural production of the original coun­try and of the adoptive country. The narrative discourse is there­fore characterized by diverse stratum of cultural assimilation. The social complexity between ethnic cultures, as David Lloyd astutely points out, can be seen in the relation of ethnic culture with the formation of the state, illustrating also how a culture is treated, at times as a concept, then at others, as an institution. The contrast and the juxtaposition of these two terms within the sphere of eth­nic discourse is fundamental in establishing the diverse modalities with which one speaks alternatively of a minority or ethnic dis­course. One may still ponder on the validity in the persistence of cultural identity in regards to the literary production of Italian origin or at least in quantifying its influence in the creative proc­ess. This point seems particularly important if it is read as a ‘mani­festo’ of certain historical and literary inadequacies in comparison to that of the homeland. It is therefore necessary to view the cul­tural phenomenon discussed here on two levels: on the synchronic level where a particular aesthetic movement in which society and culture are at odds with each other and with forms of recreation that constitute a barely or non autonomous level, such as food, songs or fashion and secondly, on a diachronic level, where the culture is seen as the apex or exemplary moment of universal cul­ture. On this point, one comes to understand the political judg­ment upon the inadequacy of ethnic identity in Italian migrant cultural production in which a diasporic national discourse is up­held and, which above all, relates to the literary criticism. A writer or poet of Italian origin writes and publishes abroad, not as though he or she was an Italian living overseas, but rather as an expression of an ethnicity containing distinct historical, social, and human values. In other words, it is not possible to read the pro­duction of diasporic literature as one slice of a far-flung Italian culture. Alternatively, it should be used as a literary form with its own autonomy and ethnic peculiarity. As I will illustrate with two literary examples, it is important to distinguish the particular from the universal, where the former is deprived of its own aesthetic and expressive autonomy, thereby falling into a condition of infe­riority, disadvantaged in respect to the dominant culture. It is not appropriate to seek an image of hegemonic culture in ethnic litera­ture. Naturally, that the texts themselves often call attention to the identification with the prevailing dominant culture, the origin or the host, cannot help but reflect the ‘disjointed formation’ as de­fined by Homi Bhabba and the double temporality of ethnic dis­course, let alone the internal contradictions the come to life from contact of ethnic discourse with the structures upon which society is usually based. He asserts that the popular discourse emerges in the liminal space of a nation’s culture, that is, in the formation of identity that Kristeva places between the historical sedimentation (pedagogy) and the loss of identity produced in the process of constructing the significance of cultural identification (performa­tive).

The ethnic verbum becomes the benchmark of the postmodern historic experience and of a history that must reconcile the episte­mological and ontological crisis of metaphysic logocentrism with the experience of multiple belonging, whether real, imagined, mythical, or simply textual. The inclusion of alterità to the infinite referential, the deconstruction of bipolarism between authenticity and non authenticity, and above all, the diverse temporal and spa­tial conception definitive of modernism and postmodernism, al­low us to see ethnicity as a contemporary epitome in the sense that it collates, by degrees, the diverse cycles of decadence and the re­newal of modernism.

Benedetta in Guysterland: A Liquid Novel by Giose Rimanelli does not fall into the predominant, indeed, generic ethnic narrative of autobiography, while in Paese Fortunato by Rosa Capiello, even if the author’s migratory experience in Australia is implied, it does so in an unusual manner, so much so, that upon publication it so­licited doubts from the Italian community in Australia as to its authenticity and reaping criticism for its possible design to dis­credit immigrants. A counter-clarification is important, given that autobiography had been considered the means of transmitting ethnic memory, par excellence, for generations. In this sense, the exemplification of the narrative structure in these two texts may serve alone to illustrate how, in response to a new temporal and historical phase in migration, the criteria appertaining to a diverse and differentiated vision of reality and time, create the outlines of cultural identity. Such a diverse dimension on the sense of belong­ing is subsequently reconciled with a diverse perception of soci­ety. Up to now, the autobiographical experience of the ethnic novel performed a meta-narrative function where the narra­tor/subject placed itself as the mediator of experience and as a temporal bridge between past and present, mediating not only in historical-temporal continuity, but also in cognitive coherence more difficult to define and therefore conflictual. (See Gilbert Sor­rentino’s rebuttal, cited above.) The deconstruction of myths of belonging and of genealogical hierarchies as the only valid classi­fications to have witnessed the past and the overall demonstration of the temporal disjointure that characterizes ethnic memory, have proved the validity of numerous anthropological-cultural studies within which Michael Fischer, to whom I refer, indicates that eth­nic identity is a process more linked to factors analogous to psy­choanalytical transference and to formation of language. As op­posed to the ethnographic text that must take into account the narratalogical level, the superimposition of more than one dis­course, that is of the informant and of the informed, on the fiction­alized discourse of the novel does not constitute an obstacle. On the contrary, it allows us to reveal and accentuate that which is hidden in the language, that which is evidenced or deferred by the sign, mediated or repressed.

Benedetta in Guysterland, written in 1970 and published in 1993 in the USA is a parody of the sentimental relationship between Italy and America achieved through the de-mythologization of stereotypes that unite these two countries. The novel recounts, albeit with constant interruptions, the formation and crystalliza­tion of cultural and literary stereotypes that unite and divide Italy and America; a sort of literary narrative equivalent to the film, Pulp Fiction, keeping in mind however that Benedetta anticipated, by twenty years, the decline of cinemagraphic myths. The frame­work of the narrative is held together by the love story between Benedetta, a young American from the Appalachian mountains, and the full-time mafioso, Joe Adonis.

The story makes ample use of the narrative pastiche and avails itself to a certain linguistic experimentation. It is particularly in­teresting to note Rimanelli’s employment of quotations and whether they are borrowed from literature or advertising slogans, they ultimately create a linguistic parody, partly to poke fun at the language and partly to expand the limits of significance from within the language itself. Take into account that Rimanelli is a native Italian speaker, the acquisition of ‘perfect’ English that he was said to have reached by means of reading and translating the American magazine Esquire, enabled him to have the familiarity and yet also the distance to be able to reveal its internal mecha­nisms. Some critics of Rimanelli have suggested that Benedetta is a novel on language itself thereby pointing out how Rimanelli’s nar­rative discourse is unable to communicate anything endowed with meaning or that could be considered trustworthy in a fixed tem­porality.

 

No, no jokes. A dike is a wooden frame kite covered with a light crispy paper, sometimes colored with red and blue patches, made to be flown in the air. But we don’t have to believe anything unless I fell like it. So I won’t face the blood and death as wild life does. I’m made of plastic sticks. They are all my kicks. And sometimes I’m ME, the sister of A be­coming the wife of B. Always fleeting around, because if you come from a broken home this is a real picture. Besides, words don’t mean much. So, I’m just going to give all as I always have. (101)

 

As Fred Gardaphé suggests in his preface to the novel:

 

The linguistic mosaic created in this novel is a metaphoric map of the Americanization process. The result then is that Italian/American literature is rejuvenated, reborn. As in na­tive American myths, this is a task accomplished by the stranger who wanders into a tribe that is at the point of de­cay, and who impregnates a maiden who gives birth to a child who will save the culture. This is very much the story of Benedetta, who at the end of the novel is pregnant with the child of Joe Adonis, the man who taught her how to live passionately. What Benedetta is pregnant with is Italian/ American literature, the bastard child of an Appalachian princess and an immigrant mafioso, a child who resides in the ripe belly of a woman locked away in an asylum. Its birth is the publication of Benedetta’s bildungsroman. As in Native American culture, this is the story of cultural re­newal in which the crossbreed becomes a cultural hero. (22)

 

Rimanelli’s novel could not have been better summarized. Gardaphé’s subtle and ironic tone underlines the implicit paradox in the allegorical novel, a symbolic union of the two cultures that produces a spurious continuity in their offspring, ‘the hyphenated Italian’; a transitional persona that resides between cultures but who embodies the genetic imprints of both, even to the point of excess. Benedetta in Guysterland also deals with language and lit­erature. Benedetta outlines the essential points that characterize North American contemporary literature yet is also full of refer­ences to exported European and Italian culture. Rimanelli was weaned on Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and Gay Telese’s Honor Thy Father as well as traditional academic culture, trace elements of which are in the numerous lettered borrowings apparent within the novel. Latin lovers, second-rate Mafiosi, and the cult of the family all move to the rhythms of bands in the smoke filled bars, from the mellow romanticism in the fashion of Bridges of Madison County to the sexual rituals initiated between Formica booths in greasy diners, consummated in colleges like the novel’s Anabasis, reminding us of Antioch College of Ohio, famous in the Seventies for a liberality of moral custom and curricula. The result of such a conflagration of elements is erratic writing, as Benedetta herself points out, speaking of Joe Adonis, who, most likely exiled on the island of Linosa to serve for his own misdeeds, “you speak not of self, but of geography” (39). The choice to use Joe Adonis, patron of diaspora, as an absent protagonist of this transnational novel, reminds us that the transoceanic leap for the first Italian migrants, has yielded a new incarnation of Hermes, protector of tourists, traders, thieves and businessmen. The author’s sophisticated use of parody extends throughout the entire historical process of the characters’ integration. We read of Santo ‘Zip the thunder’ Tris­tano:

 

Had been born in Gela, in Sicily, in a hillside house that overlooked the sea. Santo Tristano was an orphan at fifteen. He was left with the house, a large outfit for ice-cream, in addition to the farm, cattle and interests in other business. Always someone, a lost soul, was singing through the build­ings: “Il carretto passava e quell’uomo gridava: ‘Gelati!.’” He was someone of his outfit. And he loved the song. Finally he made up his mind to leave Gela, where he was known as a Gelataro, and went to live in Paliermu to attend a private college of cosmetics called Lavanda, where they played all kinds of instruments. Here he met his cousin, Joseph Adonis, father of Joe, and the two young men lived together in the secretive capital of Prince Lampedusa and the eagle Sciascia for two years, in a time of excitement and confusion because of Muscolini, an ironstud. The lavanders assumed that he would work with them, as the organizations had done. But the Perfume bosses greatly underestimated Mus­colini’s ego. He was not the sort of guy who could tolerate independent of secret groups that he could not check. Arrest warrants were issued against radical musicians, under­ground vendors of elixirs, and the so called invertebrati, guys who went transvestite, wearing all colors except black shirts. . . . later they were smuggled on a freighter bound for the Gulf of Mexico, they were met by amici and provided with a barge and a pilot who took them at night to the shores of Florida. . . . (43)

 

It is important to keep in mind that it is not only a process of Americanization performed on myths and cultural topoi of Ital­ians but also, vice versa, on the collective imagination of the aver­age American, embodied by Benedetta, the girl from the Appala­chians, the American WASP: “a former drag star of the word stage, now playing public sexophone with the Untac able Seven Sages” (33).

If history is, in some way, a recuperation of memory put in an intelligible form, Benedetta is the history of the Italian migratory experience in the United States. It is the X-ray of those who live in the liminal spaces between two cultures, two nations, and two identities.

The crisis of ethnic identity, that is to say, the fragmentation of experience incarnated in the modern individual, illustrated by in­stability, mobility, the indeterminate nature of belonging and even the simultaneity by which we define our technologically advanced society, bears the fact that this crisis is first and foremost, part of the redefinition of the conceptual habitare. The spatial dimension of postmodernism is morphologically expressed in the combina­tory games inhabiting the imaginary. As Boelhower suggests in Through the Glass Darkly, “the cultural change can be summarized in the shift from the traditional polis to the city as techné, or me­tropolis. The metropolis is the perfect representation of the dy­namics of modern life” (138). Raymond Williams notes that a key point of modernism is the migratory experiences, in particular that which relates to the transition from the province to the metropolis. Such cultural and social movement not only accompanies the lit­erary transition from tradition to realism and subsequently to modernism but extends to, as I maintain here, the postmodern era, as one sees in Rosa Capiello’s Paese Fortunato:

 

Once we get out of the taxi I look around. Under the rain the houses are all the same, more like funeral parlours and, in­side, a pervasive smell of dead cats. Redfern, like Padding­ton, Surry Hills, Chippendale, Haymarket, Darlinghurst and lots of other suburbs, seen designed like a cemetery. They remind me of the grey avenues of the Poggioreale cemetery, but without the addition of well-kept flower beds. The fos­sils which live there begin to fatten, their stomachs swell, like satisfied worms. In each of these hovels at least a dozen bodies are crammed and kicking, tenants and children, owners and children, singles. A Tower of Babel. (29–31)

 

Set in Australia’s largest city, this novel was first published in Italy in 1980 by Feltrenelli and has since been translated and pub­lished in Australia. It received cool, if not outright negative criti­cism in both countries, the reason being that, in Italy, the ethnic question and its various articulations of cultural conflictuality on which the novel hinges, are incomprehensible for a readership habituated to consider immigration as a painful remembrance of the past, one best forgotten. On the other hand, in Australia, Capiello’s readers, representative of this disarticulated national appendix, interpreted Capiello’s discourse and, in particular, her harsh and insensitive language, as an offense to the legacy of the homeland and to the dignity of the migrant in general, finding themselves described as, “rimbambiti italiani,” burini, zotici, and rompiscatole. The linguistic expressionism that characterizes Paese Fortunato certainly does not reveal a sense of Italian solidarity even if it definitively reveals the evolution of the ethnic genre in the last twenty years, shifting the focus from the traditional the­matic elements and formally characterizing and defining the mi­grant discourse. Specifically, I refer to the marked regionalism, the family ties and the topos of travel as a painful search for the lost homeland. This novel, like Rimanelli’s Benedetta in Guysterland, has an immediate spatial perspective that positions the protago­nists and the readers in the urban and metropolitan reality of Syd­ney, a chaotic and multicultural city and a center of continual eth­nic flux. In Capiello’s novel the crisis of abitare is highlighted by the neurotic movement of all the characters from one dwelling to another in the depressing circumstances typical of subhuman conditions within every large city and by the characters’ inability to settle in any one place, signifying the break with the traditional spatial scheme of Italian family found in previous ethnic literature. Moreover, we may note, from the anonymity of the described mi­grant experience, the assimilation of the individual and dissolu­tion of individual identity occurring, in primus, within the struc­ture and form of the novel. Although, in a certain sense, it is still a matter of biography, the novelty lies in the narrator’s ability to coalesce her own self into a multiplicity of others who identify the sense of alienation from the foreign reality and are kept together by their diversity (nationality, religion, gender, and sexual orienta­tion). The narrator does not privilege any one person over another but more importantly, she does not reproduce limits and cultural demarcations.

 

MacDonald Town. I’ve moved. Other Greeks, Italians, Turks, Lebanese, Aborigines. It’s the third, forth, fifth move, I’ve lost count. I live with my bum on the edge of a volcano. Ready to leap at the least hint of lava or landslide. The most difficult thing is to put down roots, to get used to these odd characters who rent us rooms. MacDonald Town, an old house at the far end of the little park. Right next to my room a nosy couple from the Abruzzi. I’ve fallen out of the frying pan into the fire. Don Luigi is the husband of the hyena with curlers in her hair. He has a fat bum, always wears shorts and long socks, always canvas shoes because of his bunions. He quickly caught on to the fact that I like people to bow and scrape before me and bow he does before my heaven-sent cunt. In fact I get the impression that I have come down from heaven to liven up their miserable dull daily toilet-cleaner routine. (127–28)

 

The first and most immediate effect produced by the individ­ual’s alienation within the metropolis is isolation, accentuated by excessive contact with the multiplicity of individuals and foreign­ers incompatible with themselves. The condition of the migrant or of those who find themselves in a multiethnic reality is still even more evident in the linguistic disintegration that takes place, not only in the communicative structure of the language but in it’s functions, that is to say, from a use of the language as social be­havior based to a certain extent on conventional elements and ex­tending to a more technical and interactive function thereby con­sistently undergoing manipulation. In Paese Fortunato this is evident in the infusion of Neapolitan dialect with the English lexi­con or morphosyntactic structure, appearing now and then the text. This stylistic novelties shape the text through the their tone and by the inner expressions of the individual in contact with a kaleidoscopic reality. Above all, they demonstrate the constant state of metamorphosis and cultural mutation in which the for­eigner must live, as in endless rebirth. Such a process is repro­duced by Capiello in a prose style that, to some, may seem linguis­tically aggressive, vulgar and excessive. Paese Fortunato and Benedetta in Guysterland, among many other examples that testify the migrant experience, indicate that, contrary to the Boelhower’s argument, ethnic narrative clearly presents an ethnic semiosis, independent of the genre question, which can parallel the national contemporary literature hitherto myopic to the existence of the contemporary multiethnic reality. These novels present an alterna­tive perspective to the traditional symbolic order based on the elements of familial roles, paternalistic cultural heredity, home, nation, and so on.

To conclude, I wish to reaffirm that the marked progress of the literature, written beyond the confines of Italy, in the last few years, has become an important point of reference to the identifi­cation of a cultural identity, given that it intersects a sense of be­longing and faithfulness with the associated elements of the na­tion, but that nevertheless puts them into question. In this sense, the narrative discourse of ethnic literature represents an important monument in the present debate between political subjectivity and/or universal identity as seen in its symbolic and literary as­pects.

 

Brunella Bigi

The University of Melbourne

 

 

Works Cited

 

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory, Class, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.

Bhabba, Homi K. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990.

Boelhower, William. “The Immigrant Novel as a Genre.” MELUS 8.1 (Spring): 16.

___. Through the Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Capiello, Rosa R. Paese Fortunato. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981.

di Leonardo, Micaela, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience. London: Cornell UP, 1984.

___. “White Ethnicities, Identity Politics, and Baby Bear’s Chair.” Social Text 41 (Winter 94): 165–91.

Fischer, Michael J. M. “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory.” Writing Culture. Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1986. 70–73.

Jameson, Fredric, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multina­tional Capital.” Social Text 17 (1987): 65–88.

Lloyd, David, “Ethnic Cultures, Minority Discourse and the State.” Colonial Discourse/Post-Colonial Theory. Ed. F. Barker, P Hulme, and M. Iversen. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994. 136–40.

MacDonald, Sharon, ed. Inside European Identities. Providence: BERG, 1993.

McClaren, Peter, ed. Postmodernism, Post-colonialism and Pedagogy. Melbourne: James Nicholas, 1995.

Rimanelli, Giose. Benedetta in Guysterland: A Liquid Novel. Mont­real: Guernica, 1993.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Tamburri, Anthony Julian. “Italian/American Cultural Studies an Emergence[y]?” Through the Looking Glass: Italian & Ital­ian/American Images in the Media. Ed. Mary J. Bona and An­thony Tamburri. Staten Island, NY: American Italian Histori­cal Association, 1994. 305–24.

___, Paolo Giordano, and Fred Gardaphé, eds. From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1991.

Williams, Raymond. “Metropolis and the Emergence of Modern­ism.” Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Litera­ture and Art. Ed. Edward Timms and David Kelley. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985. 13–24.

 

 

 


[1]“Race” here is meant as a term denoting innate and ascribed racial elements as opposed to “ethnicity” that includes attained and added values. It is of note that society tends to differentiate these two terms by diversity of behavior. To this point are numerous examples, one of which is the lynching, in New Orleans in 1891, of 11 Sicilians, accused of murdering a police chief. This occurrence illus­trates that discrimination toward Italian residents in Louisiana, whose presence was felt in the agricultural market, was due to their competitive rise in the grow­ing and selling of fruit and vegetables. Analogous are the causes that determined the massacres of Aigues-Mortes, France, 1893, and of Kalgoorlie, Australia, 1934.

[2]Peter McClaren, for example, poses some important questions that touch upon the problem of academic curricula revision. “In the present ‘postmodern’ climate, educators need to ask themselves: what is the task of cultural retrieval in an age of shifting cultural borders, the unmooring of traditional cultural symbols, the blurring of metaphorical and linguistic boundaries, the back and forth crossover of subject positions over dominant discursive regimes, the breaking apart of insti­tutionally bound structures of meaning, and the re-territorisation of desire with respect to the formations of cultural otherness which we have created? In other words, what does it mean to construct pedagogues of resistance on the basis of cultural difference within a cross-national economy that speaks both of the condi­tions of material necessity and the material density of subjectivity? More specifi­cally, how can critical educators begin to question the agency across the various relations of class, gender, race, history and ideological production in the form of popular memory and narrative forms?” (72). For an in-depth examination of these questions, refer to the entire text: Postmodernism, Post-colonialism and Peda­gogy.