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Cornelia St. Cafe 29 Cornelia Street. N.Y.C. 6 P.M. - 8 P.M. $5 minimum, includes one drink Bring poetry. Bring prose. Bring a script. Bring a friend. Come in time to sign up at 6 P.M. IAWA Business Meeting Tuesday - Jan 11th 7 P.M. at office of Windels, Marx, davies & Ives; 156 W 56th Street, 23rd Floor RSVP to Robert Viscusi 1-718-951-5847 Wednesday, January 12. The Italian American Book Club discusses Sometimes 7he Soul by Gioia Timpanelli 8 P. M. Barnes & Noble Hoboken 59 Washington St. Free Admission. For information, call Dina Gerasia at 201-798-6472. Thursday, January 13. Book-signing. Liz De Franco, editor and contributor Cocktail 2000. Barnes & Noble Forest Hills, 70-00 Austin Street 7:30 P.M. Tuesday, January 18th David A-J. Richards reads from his book Italian American: The Racializing of an Ethnic Identity 7:30 P.M Barnes & Noble 4 Astor Place Manhattan Free Admission For information, call 212-420-1322. Thursday, January 20. IAWA Career Workshop I. Coordinated by Liz De Franco. Self-Publishing with Sadie Penzato and Nick Mangieri. Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimo, New York University, 24 West 12th St. 6 to 9 P.M. Optional contribution $10. This series will allow IAWA members to discuss and to network with persons working in many areas of publication. Space is limited. For reservations, please call 212-625- 3499 and leave your name and telephone number slowly. All reservations will be confirmed by telephone. Thursday, January 20. Alexander Stille presents the book Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile by Stanislao Pugliese. 6 P.M. Italian Cultural Institute 686 Park Ave at 68th St. ttan Free Admission. For RSVP / information, call 8794242. Tuesday, January 25. Radio Broadcast / Reading Vittoria repetto "Anything Goes! " - WNYE-FM (91.5) 12 noon- 12:30 P.M. Tuesday, January 25. Women's Poetry Jam with an Open. Featured Readers: Lisa Meyer and Alice Rosenblatt Hosted by Vittoria repetto 7 P.M. to 9 P.M. Bluestockings 172 Allen St. (between Stanton & Rivington - South of E. Houston) in Manhattan. $2 Suggested donation; for information, call 212-777-6028. From Now to February 20, 2000. Exhibition - The Italians of New York: Five Centuries of Struggle and Achievement at The New York Historical Society, 2 West 77th St. (Central Park W.) For further information, admission etc., call 212-873-3400 or visit http://www.history.org. Bordighera Poetry Prize. 4th Annual Italian / American Bilingual Award offering book publication and $2000 (translation no longer necessary in advance) deadline May 31st, 2000. For guidelines, send S.A.S.E. to Daniela Gioseffi & Alfredo de Palchi: Contest Coordinators; P.O. Box 15; Andover, N.J. 07821-0015. | Up to the Menu |
The Italian American Writers Association
First National Conference The Italian American Book Friday and Saturday, October 13-14, 2000 Since 1991, iawa has developed a community of Italian American writers, editors, publishers, agents, scholars, translators, booksellers, and others with a strong interest in the development of the Italian American book market. It is time to bring this community into direct contact with the larger world of book production and distribution. That is the focus of this conference. Background. iawa’s mission is to promote Italian American literature. To this end, since 1991, it has developed a program of monthly events designed to increase reading, writing, and buying of Italian American books. It organizes these programs under three rules:
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This book belongs to two categories that one might not have expected to find together.
First, Italian American is a retelling of the Faust legend, wherein Italian Americans sell themselves into moral slavery in return for the price of a decent job and the right to call themselves white people. In the old story, Faust sells himself to the devil in return for twenty- four years of fulfillment. Professor Richards' version is a vivid one, explaining how it comes to be that many people engage in racist behavior even though they themselves are among its victims. On Richards' account, in return for a measure of white privilege, many Italian Americans support the very racist United States culture that assigns them an inferior place. Their support partially includes active racism, but much more fully imposes upon Italian Americans a practice of complicitous silence on the question. Such silence has devastating effects. It leads to a complete privatization of the question of Italian American identity, making true public discussion of the question impossible, focusing instead upon what people can comfortably say within the limits of family conversation, with its small constituency and its aureole of tabooed subjects.
Second, Richards gives a history of the disillusions and deceptions that led Italian Americans
to conspire in their own silencing. If the Italian Americans made a bargain with the Devil, in
Professor Richards' narrative that Devil is a lawyer. A constitutional lawyer, to be precise. The
Devil in the shape of a constitutional lawyer set up the conditions for the bargain. In the United
States, he set up a constitution that produced all the freedoms that liberalism promised - all
except one, that is, and US liberal constitutionalism saw its promises broken on the rocks of
slavery and racism. In the new Italy of 1861, that same Devil reappeared. For the promises of the
Risorgimento were also undone by racism. The liberal constitutionalism of United Italy
foundered on Northern Italy's racist construction of Southern Italy. The Italian disillusion and
the American disillusion were comparable, but most Italian immigrants judged that the disillusion
was worse back in Italy. And so now they were set up for their bargain with the American Devil.
In the U.S.A., as long as Italian Americans went along with their own subjugation and silencing,
they were allowed to enjoy many of the privileges of white people.
Now this is not exactly how Richards puts it. At length he analyzes the "Faustian bargain" Italian
Americans have made with American racism, and these pages of analysis have a tragic dignity
that places them among the essential pages in Italian American literature. Richards does not
speak (as I have spoken here) of the Devil, even though he speaks of Faust. Rather, he turns the
reader's attention to the paradign case of moral slavery: the divided consciousness of the African
American, as defined by W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Richards writes that
"African American self-understanding of American racism was deepened and energised by the
scholarship and activism of W.E.B., DuBois." According to DuBois, the African American finds
himself 'in "a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself
through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness,
this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the
tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness-an
American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in
one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torm asunder." "The history of
the American Negro is the history of this strife, - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to
merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older
selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world
and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows
that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to
be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without
having the doors of Opportunity roughly closed 'in his face."
Richards writes for a similarly doubled consciousness in the Italian American. Doubled, and
redoubled, and redoubled again: in his opening chapter, he explains that he is an Italian American
who inherited a name his immigrant grandfather had silenced from Ricciardelli to Richards, and
that he is an openly gay man living in a stable relationship, a fall into what he later in the book
calls the "unspeakability" of homosexuality in American and in Italian American worlds. The
series of homologous exclusions that frame this narrative gives it an intensity that I had not
expected 'in what I took to be a monograph by a famous scholar of constitutional law. And he
writes as such a scholar. The Devil never makes a direct appearance. Instead, Montesquieu,
Madison, Mazzini, Cavour: Richards presents the construction of Italian American identity as an
event in the history of constitutional law, a branch of study where Faustian bargains get plenty of
air time.
IAWA was founded specifically to break the silence concerning Italian American racism, as was IAMUS (Italian
Americans for a Multicultural United States). The community of Italian American intellectuals will find David
Richard's Italian American: The Racializing of an Ethnic Identity enormously valueable - an absolutely fresh
look at a problem only too familiar and for too long. It places our cultural dilemmas squarely in the history
of the legal world that has shaped our destinies for the past two centuries. And it situates our history at a clear
salient to the question of foundational principle of the republic, an obsession that would find ways to repeat
itself in every aspect of the culture of the new nation. In short, David Richards has brought the discussion of Italian
American history into dialogue with the central themes of United States history.
P.O. Box 2011, New York, N.Y. 10013 1-212-625-3499 | Up to the Menu | |
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· IAWA First National Conference
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· Why IAWA: Episode 20
· IAWA Newsletter
· Membership Application
· Conference Registration
· Workshop Registration
· Past Events
· Our Contact Information
