Italys Many Diasporas

Italy's residents are a migratory people. Since 1800 well over 27 million left home, but over half also returned home again. As cosmopolitans, exiles, and 'workers of the world' they transformed their homeland and many of the countries where they worked or settled abroad. But did they form a diaspora? Migrants maintained firm ties to native villages, cities and families. Few felt much loyalty to a larger nation of Italians. Rather than form a 'nation unbound,' the transnational lives of Italy's migrants kept alive international regional cultures that challenged the hegemony of national states around the world. This ambitious and theoretically innovative overview examines the social, cultural and economic integration of Italian migrants. It explores their complex yet distinctive identity and their relationship with their homeland taking a comprehensive approach.

Italy's residents are a migratory people. Since 1800 well over 27 million left home, but over half also returned home again. As cosmopolitans, exiles, and 'workers of the world' they transformed their homeland and many of the countries where they worked or settled abroad. But did they form a diaspora? Migrants maintained firm ties to native villages, cities and families. Few felt much loyalty to a larger nation of Italians. Rather than form a 'nation unbound,' the transnational lives of Italy's migrants kept alive international regional cultures that challenged the hegemony of national states around the world. This ambitious and theoretically innovative overview examines the social, cultural and economic integration of Italian migrants. It explores their complex yet distinctive identity and their relationship with their homeland taking a comprehensive approach.

Offering a kaleidoscopic perspective on the experiences of Italian workers on foreign soil, Italian Workers of the World explores the complex links between international class formation and nation building. Distinguished by an international panel of contributors, this wide-ranging volume examines how the reception of immigrants in their new countries shaped their sense of national identity and helped determine the nature of the multiethnic states in which they settled. In Argentina and Brazil, Italian migrants were welcomed as a civilizing influence and were instrumental in establishing and leading syndicalist and anarcho-syndicalist labor movements committed to labor internationalism. In the United States, by contrast, where Italian workers were greeted by the American Federation of Labor's hostility to socialism, internationalism, and unskilled laborers, they organized in ethnically mixed unions, including the radical Industrial Workers of the World. The xenophobia they encountered in the land of opportunity ultimately encouraged sympathy among Italian Americans for Mussolini's modernizing, imperialist ambitions for the Italian state.Covering the work of republican Garibaldi boundaries of historical nationalism.

Loretta Baldassar is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia. --

This book explores the role of Mediterranean imaginaries in one of the preeminent tropes of Italian history: the formation or 'making of' Italians. While previous scholarship on the construction of Italian identity has often focused too narrowly on the territorial notion of the nation-state, and over-identified Italy with its capital, Rome, this book highlights the importance of the Mediterranean Sea to the development of Italian collective imaginaries. From this perspective, this book re-interprets key historical processes and actors in the history of modern Italy, and thereby challenges mainstream interpretations of Italian collective identity as weak or incomplete. Ultimately, it argues that Mediterranean imaginaries acted as counterweights to the solidification of a 'national' Italian identity, and still constitute alternative but equally viable modes of collective belonging.

Bound by Distance takes its place among a growing body of scholarship the goal of which is to challenge the kind of thinking that reproduces the "West" as a stable and homogenous political and discursive entity. The Italian nation, with its peculiar process of formation, the continuous tensions between its own northern and southern regions, and its history of emigration, provides an important case for complicating and reassessing concepts of national, racial, economic, and cultural dominance. The author analyzes the interactive space of the history of Italian state formation, Italian subaltern literature, Italian emigrant writing, and the current situation of North African and Asian immigrants to Italy, in order to contest the "feigned homogeneity" of the Italian nation and to complicate and reassess concepts of national, racial, economic, and cultural dominance.

The Cultures of Italian Migration allows the adjective 'Italian' to qualify people's movements along diverse trajectories and temporal dimensions. Discussions on migrations to and from Italy meet in that discursive space where critical concepts like 'home,' 'identity,' 'subjectivity,' and 'otherness' eschew stereotyping. This volume demonstrates that interpretations of old migrations are necessary in order to talk about contemporary Italy. New migrations trace new non linear paths in the definition of a multicultural Italy whose roots are unmistakably present throughout the centuries. Some of these essays concentrate on topics that are historically long-term, such as emigration from Italy to the Americas and southern Pacific Ocean. Others focus on the more contemporary phenomena of immigration to Italy from other parts of the world, including Africa. This collection ultimately offers an invitation to seek out new and different modes of analyzing the migratory act.

In a perceptive and arresting analysis, Robin Cohen introduces his distinctive approach to the study of the world’s diasporas. This book investigates the changing meanings of the concept and the contemporary diasporic condition, including case studies of Jewish, Armenian, African, Chinese, British, Indian, Lebanese and Caribbean people. The first edition of this book had a major impact on diaspora studies and was the foundational text in an emerging research and teaching field. This second edition extends and clarifies Robin Cohen’s argument, addresses some critiques and outlines new perspectives for the study of diasporas. It has also been made more student-friendly with illustrations, guided readings and suggested essay questions.

This book delves into the history of the Horn of Africa diaspora in Italy and Europe through the stories of those who fled to Italy from East African states. It draws on oral history research carried out by the BABE project (Bodies Across Borders: Oral and Visual Memories in Europe and Beyond) in a host of cities across Italy that explored topics including migration journeys, the memory of colonialism in the Horn of Africa, cultural identity in Italy and Europe, and Mediterranean crossings. This book shows how the cultural memory of interviewees is deeply linked to an intersubjective context that is changing Italian and European identities. The collected narratives reveal the existence of another Italy – and another Europe – through stories that cross national and European borders and unfold in transnational and global networks. They tell of the multiple identities of the diaspora and reconsider the geography of the continent, in terms of experiences, emotions, and close relationships, and help reinterpret the history and legacy of Italian colonialism.