Re-Mapping Italian America. Places, Cultures, Identities

In the last three decades, Italian/American culture has known, at last, a veritable renaissance and has started to be researched from diasporic, transnational, trans-lingual, and global perspectives by a growing number of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Working from an interdisciplinary standpoint, and taking as basis the latest developments in the field, the essays in this volume are meant as a contribution in the ongoing, collective effort at expanding and updating knowledge concerning Italian/American literature, cinema, and culture in its various articulations. They explore the effects that taking into account the texts’ imaginary, often linked to the idea of space, mobility, and change, produces on our understanding of Italian/American culture, and how this knowledge can help construct a new narrative of Italian/American life, as well as provide a more complex understanding (and problematizing) of American history and culture in a transnational context. As the international conference “Re-Mapping Italian America. Places, Cultures, Identities” (Roma Tre University, 2016) has made clear, it is high time to reformulate the notions of place, culture, and identity in order to arrive at a more dynamic definition of these concepts. Such a re-consideration allows for new paradigms flexible enough to make sense of the most significant changes in the field of contemporary Italian/American studies and suggestive of additional future perspectives in Italian/American criticism.