Articles by: Laura e. Ruberto

  • Life & People

    Translating Italian Women Writers in the Age of Elena Ferrante

    In 1959 Columbia University Italian Professor Olga Ragusa published “Women Novelists in Postwar Italy” in the journal Books Abroad out of the University of Oklahoma. It was quite likely the first time English-language readers, even just those reading obscure academic journals, would have come across Gianna Manzini’s name.  Without social media or even major news organs, like the New York Times, covering her work, transnational academics were Manzini’s best bet in getting her books read outside of Italy.
     

     

     

    In her native Italy, however, Manzini (1896-1974) had been publishing her short stories and novels as early as 1924, when she was 28 years old. Her writing first appeared on the cultural pages of newspapers such as Florence’s La Nazione and Milan’s Corriere della Sera, although later she was published by large Italian publishing houses and won the prestigious Viareggio Prize (1956) and the Premio Campiello (1971).

     

     

     

     
    Gianna Manzini with the critic Mario Praz (1946)

     

    On reflection, it’s not surprising that few had heard of Manzini when Ragusa, in 1959, included her in a list of other contemporary Italian women writers who Ragusa noted were part of the “coming of age of the woman writer in Italy.” As Ragusa was clearly aware women writers, and Italian women writers specifically, had long been seen by both critics and the general public as secondary in artistic worth to their male counterparts.

     

     

     

     

     

    In fact, Manzini, even with her early successes and support by such well-established writers as Eugenio Montale, was not shielded from patriarchy’s blows. Like so many other talented women writers, her oeuvre has been by and large neglected by all but a handful of academics. Thus it is no small gesture that Italica Press takes on the English-language publications of her work today in this and other recent similar publications.

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Gianna Manzini's Sulla soglia (1973)
     

     

    First published in 1973 in an anthology (also titled Sulla soglia), Threshold, the novella Irena Stanic Rasin and I translated and just published, deserves a spot within the tradition of postmodern fiction, with its evocative and slippery use of symbolism, its self-consciously confusing temporality and its unclear relationship between space and perspective. At the same time, it’s imbued with an immediacy of emotion and personal subjectivity unique among postmodern fiction. As such Sulla soglia might rightly be situated within the genre of creative nonfiction or even postmodern memoir. Also significant is how Manzini’s play with language brings into focus inner struggles and emotional expressions specific to women and women’s everyday experiences.

     

     

     

     

     

    Rossella Baldecchi's painting, "Il cielo addosso" (2013),
    one in a series "in homage" to Gianna Manzini 

    The novella, Sulla soglia, offers an experimental and introspective look at a daughter’s relationship to her mother’s last days. Her writing style and her subject material are raw, unnerving, and fragile. Take these two passages from the new translation—one, an example of her metacritical-esque references to language, the other, a plainly-written description of the pain of living near the edges of death:

     

     

     

     

     

    Every place has its forbidden language. I was certainly using some inadmissible words — words that break — and their fragments hurt everybody. They would bleed, if they could.

     

     

     

     

     

    “I remember, Mama, when swallowing became difficult for you. It became

     

                  obvious when you had to take your medicine. Oh, as usual, I would believe in it blindly.
                  ‘It doesn’t go down,’ you would say, bewildered. And I, ‘Try, try harder.’ Until you
                   crushed the capsule against your palate, and then you had to rinse out your mouth.
                  You were frightened. I can still see your bewildered and astonished eyes and your head,
                  which, falling back, was sinking into the pillow in such a strange, strange way. Your
                  small head, almost only hair and eyes, was plunging faster than a stone would. ‘I can’t.
                  I can’t take it any more. My throat. My throat won’t take it.’”

     

     

     

    Manzini’s general anonymity has sometimes been explained by pointing out that her writing is too oblique, her syntax too challenging. Following this logic, translating her work into English would seem to be a senseless act.

     

     

    But 43 years after the first publication of Sulla soglia, in an era when Elena Ferrante, an unidentified Italian writer has become an international sensation, in great part because of the success of the English-language translations of her remarkably honest and well-crafted novels, let's also return to reading those writers, like Manzini, whose work has remained on a threshold.

     

    ____________________________________________________________ 

     

    Gianna Manzini's Threshold (Italica Press, 2016)
     

    Nota Bene: This blog post is liberally borrowed from my Introduction to the translation, “The Forbidden Language of Little White Boots and Butterflies: An Introduction to Gianna Manzini’s Sulla soglia (Threshold),” (by Laura E. Ruberto), found in Gianna Manzini’s Threshold, Translated by Laura E. Ruberto & Irena Stanic Rasin, Italica Press, 2016.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Christmas eCards - of a Radical Italian American Kind

    In 2009 I wrote a Christmas-related blog post prompted by a holiday card I saw for sale that used a Tina Modotti photograph of a close-up of a woman’s full breast and a baby nursing as an evocative alternative image to the traditional Holy Family. Thinking then about Modotti, an unsung feminist heroine of Italian radical immigrant history, led me to look for other signs of progressive politics within Italian American Christmas traditions.
     
     
    In the spirit of that post, I playfully created a series of Radical Italian American Christmas eCards this year. The cards illuminate real historical Italian American men and women who in a variety of ways lived, worked, or otherwise participated in a radical rethinking of cultural politics and creative potentials.
     
     
     
    These cards don’t tell their stories, but their experiences have been documented (and continue to be) by a number of scholars, authors, and artists.
     

     

     

    You can find Holiday eCards (click on image to open) with:

    Angela Bambace                                     Ralph Fasanella

                                          

     James Groppi                                        Tina Modotti

                                      
     

     

     

    Maria Roda                                               Vito Russo

                                          

    Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti
     

      

    Mario Savio                                              Carlo Tresca
     

                                         

     

    Click on the images above to get each eCard or go here to see them all together.
     
     
    The individuals in these cards, and many others, remind us that political agency can support social change, that art makes and encourages new directions of thinking, and that beliefs are not constrained by institutional structures and traditional boundaries but instead can transcend those in the name of the disenfranchised, the exploited, and the under-represented. In the era of Antonin Scalias and Joe Arpaios, it's particularly relevant to recall and take note of such alternative possibilities.

    And what better time then Christmas to highlight progressive actions, actions that connect with some of the associations the holidays have—generosity, community, and hope.

     
     
    So, take this small gesture of joy in the spirit of the season. Please freely post, email, share on FB, tweet, send, download or print them out.

    Buone feste!

     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
  • Life & People

    The Watts Towers in Southern Italy: Connecting California with Irpinia

    I started this blog in 2007 with a post that highlighted transnational links between the landlocked Southern Italian area known as Irpinia and California, the Golden State. It is a connection to which I have returned multiple times in these pages as well as in my research.
     
     
    Earlier this summer I was fortunate to travel through parts of Italy with U.S. and Italian colleagues presenting the book Sabato Rodia’s Towers in WattsArt, Migrations, Development (edited by Luisa Del Giudice, Fordham University Press, 2014).  
     
     
    Among our stops was an amazing visit to Serino, the birthplace of Sabato Rodia. Serino—is part of Irpinia, and the town and the community immediately seemed familiar to me—from the intonation of the Serino dialect to the caciocavallo, from the melodic song of the tarantella performances in honor of our visit to the hillsides still green and lush in late June.  
     
     
     

    Center of Rivottoli and Carnevale performers

     
    We know very little about Rodia’s time in Italy before his migration in the 1890s, but he was born in Rivottoli, a hilly hamlet (“frazione”) of Serino. However, until I visited I had not recognized fully that Rodia was not just from Southern Italy, nor even from a small town in the province of Avellino. Rodia was Irpino.
     
    A somewhat forgotten area of Italy, geographically isolated, ravished by earthquakes and emigration, Irpinia, continues today to be economically depressed and isolated in many ways. (See the coda for a poem by Pasquale Stiso, former Communist mayor and poet from the Irpinia town of Andretta, describing Irpinia in the 1950s.) Rodia would have been part of an exodus of the area that has been going on now for well over 100 years and that has left many towns with populations dramatically lower than what they were in the early twentieth century.
     

    Group shot after the presentation of Sabato Rodia’s Towers in Watts 
    (Serino, June 2014)

     
     
     
    After our formal presentation in Serino, we went to Rivottoli. Today Rodia’s family house is barely standing, a crumbling structure, like thousands of others in the region, that was destroyed in the 1980 Irpinia Earthquake and never rebuilt. 
     
    In addition to meeting one of Rodia’s relatives, Vincenzo Rodia, I also spoke briefly with a man, Angelo Filarmonio, who had visited the Watts Towers in 1984 while on a tour of the U.S. organized by the former Banca Popolare dell’Irpinia. Filarmonio’s family house in Rivottoli was right next to Rodia’s, and as a neighbor to the family he had heard about Sabato’s constructions.
     

    interior shot of the Rodia family home, June 2014

     
    These photographs and the community memory in Serino and Rivottoli of Rodia and his work provide a framework for further understanding the Towers and their place in cultural history.
     

     
    in Rivottoli with Angelo Filarmonio holding his photos taken in 1984
    at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles
    (with Amoroso Raimondo and Cirino Filippo.)
    For me, a scholar particularly interested in transnational migration in Irpinia and material culture, this visit underscored the need to excavate further what it means for Sabato Rodia to have been not only an immigrant from Southern Italy, but from Irpinia specifically.  
     
    The physical presence of Sabato Rodia in Irpinia—the remains of his home, the memory of the community, the monument made in his honor (see photo below), not to mention what might possibly be uncovered in the town’s public archives—could be used both to construct a museum to honor Rodia’s past and to situate Serino within a contemporary cultural legacy that keeps pushing beyond the here and now.
     

    contemporary sculpture dedicated to Sabato Rodia and all emigrants, Serino

     
     
    I’d like to express my sincerest gratitude to everyone in Serino and Rivottoli, but especially to the commune and Serino’s mayor, Gaetano De Feo, as well as everyone at the Associazione RIVUS, especially Simone De Feo. I also thank Katia Ballachino, Alessandra Broccolini, Luisa Del Giudice, and Joseph Sciorra.
     

     

      ___________________________________________________________________

     

     

     

    In the 1950s, Pasquale Stiso, former Communist mayor and poet from the Irpinia town of Andretta, described Irpinia this way (English translation below the Italian original).
     

     

     

     

    Pasquale Stiso
     
    La mia terra
     
    La mia terra
    muore
    oggi definitivamente
    l’ho compreso.
    I contadini
    lungo le rotabili
    non ci hanno salutato
    con la mano tesa
    nei loro occhi
    non c’era l’ombra
    di un sorriso
    solo una mestizia
    grande
    pesava sui loro volti.
    La mia terra
    la mia terra
    muore
    ma nessuno sente
    questo grido
    nessuno ha pieta’
    per la mia terra.
     

    ----

    Pasquale Stiso
     
    My Land
     
    My land
    is dying
    definitively today
    I have understood.
    The peasants
    along the freight cars
    did not greet us
    with their hands raised,
    in their eyes
    there was no hint
    of a smile
    only an immense 
    melancholy
    weighted down their glance.
    My land
    my land
    is dying
    but no one hears
    this cry
    no one has pity
    for my land.
     

     

     

     

     

    (Translation mine.)
  • Op-Eds

    Mobsters in Sin City


    While I don’t scream for anti-defamation protests with every Olive Garden commercial, I was on ready to be miffed at too many violin cases and cannoli references when I took a quick spin around the Las Vegas Mob Museum a few months ago.

     
    Timed to coincide with the anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the grand opening  of the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, or Mob Museum, took place two years ago, on February 14, 2012. Housed in the former federal courthouse for Clark County (an old three-story neoclassical building that was one of the locations for the 1950 organized crime Senate hearings, led by Senator Estes Kefauver), the museum takes full advantage Las Vegas’s connection to the popular imagination of the mob, repackaging it into a tidy, PG-rated spectacle.
     



    Clark County Former Federal Court House, now the Las Vegas Mob Museum


    In my limited time there I was mostly interested in understanding how the museum would handle the ethnicity issue—specifically the Italian Americans-as-mobsters conundrum.
     
    I knew that the spot had been plagued by controversies even before it ever opened.The drive to open the museum was spearheaded by then-Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman—a former defense lawyer for a number of high-level men accused of organized criminal activity. Goodman had a cameo roll in Scorsese’s Casino, playing himself defending De Niro’s character, Ace Rothstein.
     


    Oscar Goodman, early 1980s, defending Anthony "The Ant" Spilotro,

    (photo,
    Vegas Magazine)

     


    Oddly enough, for the most part the museum seems almost to skirt the issue of the relationship between ethnicity and crime by basically never stating the obvious. In fact, specific ethnic or racial groups are barely pointed out at all. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there.
     


    Introduction to the gallery on gangsters in Hollywood

     
    In the first “historical section,” visitors are shown through photographs and film images that the development of organized crime at the turn of the 20th century in the U.S. was mostly an immigrant phenomenon related to poverty and discrimination. With equal focus on the challenges faced by the triad of Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants, the museum notes describe a “secret criminal society” some immigrants brought “with them from Sicily”—thus setting one immigrant group apart from the others and suggesting that all further developments stemmed directly from this importation.

     
     
    Refrigerator magnets, for sale in the Mob Museum gift shop

    But as far as I could tell, after this origin story, such ethnic specificity never really comes up so clearly again, even though I have no doubt that the majority of the criminals referenced throughout the exhibits have names that end in vowels—for every Lansky, Stein, and McGrath were dozens of Boiardos, Genoveses, Accardos, and Cassos.
     
    But the same could be said for the FBI and police names noted. In fact, Giuseppe “Joe” Petrosino is celebrated with a large plaque recognizing him as an “American Hero."

     


    Petrosino as an "American Hero"

     


    And the large wall space devoted to “case studies” of an undercover police officer, a strike force attorney, and a government witness also all bear Italian American names.


     
      

    Frank Calotta, Donna Congeni Fitzsimmons, & Joseph D. Pistone/Donnie Brasco

      (featured undercover police officers and FBI agents)


     
    I walked through an impressive array of ephemera, archival media footage, and interactive displays that together construct a sensationalized but well-documented story: the development of Las Vegas as a city of gambling and spectacle played well with the culture of gangsters; the role of Lucky Luciano during World War II; the Kefauver hearings, when “Americans invited the mob into their home;” FBI wire-tapping and mapping of Northeastern neighborhoods; and descriptions of the everyday life of gangsters (wedding albums, prayer cards, golf clubs, high-security prison).

     
     
    prayer cards, invitations, family photos and other objects from everyday life

     
    But what struck me again and again is that although Italian Americans dominated organized crime in the U.S. for decades, nothing was really being made of this fact.

     
    Sure there were a handful of Italian-like references that seemed blatantly exploitative and unnecessary—like the fake Italian American grocer’s sign above the “Weapon Methods” section or the Warholesque MOB tomato cans display. But these moments were by and large rare among the 42,000-square-foot institution.

     
     
    Even in the section on organized crime and popular culture, the predominance of Italian ethnic-specific mobsters in the movies wasn’t mentioned. In an age when gangsters and Italian Americans remain synonymous in popular imagination, the museum seems to go out of its way to underplay that connection, even to a fault.

     
    The lack of references to ethnic, racial, or nationally specific trends (also glaringly absent in later gallery spaces devoted to contemporary organized crime on a global scale or to areas devoted to U.S. urban crime) throughout the museum seems misleading or disingenuous at best.
     
    In the end, the Mob Museum is merely a very limited attraction set against the glitz and glamour of Sin City, so much so that I wonder if Jean Baudrillard would have even considered it part of the hyperreal that Las Vegas otherwise does so well.
     
     
     

  • Art & Culture

    Mobsters in Sin City


    While I don’t scream for anti-defamation protests with every Olive Garden commercial, I was on ready to be miffed at too many violin cases and cannoli references when I took a quick spin around the Las Vegas Mob Museum a few months ago.

     
    Timed to coincide with the anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the grand opening  of the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, or Mob Museum, took place two years ago, on February 14, 2012. Housed in the former federal courthouse for Clark County (an old three-story neoclassical building that was one of the locations for the 1950 organized crime Senate hearings, led by Senator Estes Kefauver), the museum takes full advantage Las Vegas’s connection to the popular imagination of the mob, repackaging it into a tidy, PG-rated spectacle.
     



    Clark County Former Federal Court House, now the Las Vegas Mob Museum


    In my limited time there I was mostly interested in understanding how the museum would handle the ethnicity issue—specifically the Italian Americans-as-mobsters conundrum.
     
    I knew that the spot had been plagued by controversies even before it ever opened.The drive to open the museum was spearheaded by then-Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman—a former defense lawyer for a number of high-level men accused of organized criminal activity. Goodman had a cameo roll in Scorsese’s Casino, playing himself defending De Niro’s character, Ace Rothstein.
     


    Oscar Goodman, early 1980s, defending Anthony "The Ant" Spilotro,

    (photo,
    Vegas Magazine)

     


    Oddly enough, for the most part the museum seems almost to skirt the issue of the relationship between ethnicity and crime by basically never stating the obvious. In fact, specific ethnic or racial groups are barely pointed out at all. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there.
     


    Introduction to the gallery on gangsters in Hollywood

     
    In the first “historical section,” visitors are shown through photographs and film images that the development of organized crime at the turn of the 20th century in the U.S. was mostly an immigrant phenomenon related to poverty and discrimination. With equal focus on the challenges faced by the triad of Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants, the museum notes describe a “secret criminal society” some immigrants brought “with them from Sicily”—thus setting one immigrant group apart from the others and suggesting that all further developments stemmed directly from this importation.

     
     
    Refrigerator magnets, for sale in the Mob Museum gift shop

    But as far as I could tell, after this origin story, such ethnic specificity never really comes up so clearly again, even though I have no doubt that the majority of the criminals referenced throughout the exhibits have names that end in vowels—for every Lansky, Stein, and McGrath were dozens of Boiardos, Genoveses, Accardos, and Cassos.
     
    But the same could be said for the FBI and police names noted. In fact, Giuseppe “Joe” Petrosino is celebrated with a large plaque recognizing him as an “American Hero."

     


    Petrosino as an "American Hero"

     


    And the large wall space devoted to “case studies” of an undercover police officer, a strike force attorney, and a government witness also all bear Italian American names.


     
      

    Frank Calotta, Donna Congeni Fitzsimmons, & Joseph D. Pistone/Donnie Brasco

      (featured undercover police officers and FBI agents)


     
    I walked through an impressive array of ephemera, archival media footage, and interactive displays that together construct a sensationalized but well-documented story: the development of Las Vegas as a city of gambling and spectacle played well with the culture of gangsters; the role of Lucky Luciano during World War II; the Kefauver hearings, when “Americans invited the mob into their home;” FBI wire-tapping and mapping of Northeastern neighborhoods; and descriptions of the everyday life of gangsters (wedding albums, prayer cards, golf clubs, high-security prison).

     
     
    prayer cards, invitations, family photos and other objects from everyday life

     
    But what struck me again and again is that although Italian Americans dominated organized crime in the U.S. for decades, nothing was really being made of this fact.

     
    Sure there were a handful of Italian-like references that seemed blatantly exploitative and unnecessary—like the fake Italian American grocer’s sign above the “Weapon Methods” section or the Warholesque MOB tomato cans display. But these moments were by and large rare among the 42,000-square-foot institution.

     
     
    Even in the section on organized crime and popular culture, the predominance of Italian ethnic-specific mobsters in the movies wasn’t mentioned. In an age when gangsters and Italian Americans remain synonymous in popular imagination, the museum seems to go out of its way to underplay that connection, even to a fault.

     
    The lack of references to ethnic, racial, or nationally specific trends (also glaringly absent in later gallery spaces devoted to contemporary organized crime on a global scale or to areas devoted to U.S. urban crime) throughout the museum seems misleading or disingenuous at best.
     
    In the end, the Mob Museum is merely a very limited attraction set against the glitz and glamour of Sin City, so much so that I wonder if Jean Baudrillard would have even considered it part of the hyperreal that Las Vegas otherwise does so well.
     
     
     

  • The Spectacle of the Nativity in Valenti Angelo’s Art


    Valenti Angelo—author, illustrator, painter—was once asked about the presence of Christmas in so many of his books: “Christmas appears in many of your books as a happy holiday, sometimes as the climax of the story.”

    His response:


    In some of my books I have found some holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, essential to enhance the spirit of joy and family reunions. I feel that Christmas is an important factor in the yearly rounds of human events. It does have a purifying effect on people, mainly because of a world so infested with consumerism and lack of communion and the spirit of faith. Amen.
     
    I have blogged about Angelo before and am familiar with his style, especially his emphasis on religious iconography. When pressed on this issue by Ruth Teiser and Catherine Harroun (who interviewed him between 1977-1979 for the Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley) he responded:
     
    During my brief period in school in Italy, where children were taught by the Franciscan monks, a considerable amount of religion became a part of my studies. Some of it remains to this day. I would say I am informally a religious man.
     
    This past fall I read a few of his books to my six-year-old daughter. We read The Marble Fountain (a literary treat set in post-WWII Italy) and The Bells of Bleecker Street (also a post-WWII story, set on the streets of New York City’s Little Italy).


    From The Bells of Bleecker Street, Valenti Angelo, 1949


    The Bells of Bleecker Street
    is primarily a Christmas story, centered in part around a marionette performance a group of Italian American children stage retelling the story of the Nativity. Set in 1945, the novel describes Italian American families preparing for the holidays while some expectantly await soldiers’ return from overseas. Angelo vividly recounts an era of war while also characterizing a community steeped in religion, craft, labor, and a broad sense of family.

    From The Bells of Bleecker Street, Valenti Angelo, 1949




    Like many of Angelo’s children’s novels, creativity and everyday cultural expressions are central in the narrative. Take the character of Professor Dante: one minute Angelo describes him thoughtfully picking a tiny fig from a lonely tree he finds along the Hudson River, the next teaching kids basic musical instrumentation, or building sets for the Christmas -themed puppet show.


    From The Bells of Bleecker Street, Valenti Angelo, 1949



    The show itself is all Italian American spectacle:
     
    Sprinkled here and there, small electric bulbs sparkled like many-colored stars. A huge four-pointed star hung suspended from the center of the proscenium. Its luminous glow stood sentinel over the smaller lights. Along the walls hung large wreaths, framing bright-colored scenes from the story of the nativity, interlaced with festoons of red and green bunting. (169)
     
    Professor Dante describes the entire scene as “a thing of beauty” (170). (And note the poetic cleverness of Angelo’s emphasis of the star in a work by a character named Dante.)  It is a sentiment about the decorative aspect of the sacred echoed by other Valenti Angelo literary characters.

    In The Marble Fountain a sculpture of Saint Francis is discovered buried in someone’s front yard; unearthing it turns the yard into a sacred space: “Uncle Gigi’s yard had become a place of worship” (pg. 111), and at Easter the children adorn the saint with garlands of cut flowers. Similarly, the young war orphan, Piccolo, takes in his Italian village’s preparation for Christmas this way:


    Piccolo marveled at the many Virgin Marys that stood in recessed windowsills. The bakeshop window had in it a scene of the nativity, one of the finest Piccolo had ever seen.  (pg. 207)
     
    The grand presepi found in cathedrals and churches—as well as the crèches, from the most humble to the most complex, in people’s homes—all speak in varying ways beyond the religious story they represent. As Joseph Sciorra’s work on Italian American Nativity scenes in New York City teaches us:

    the presepio is not a static objet d’art admired solely for its formal aesthetic attributes, but an ephemera assemblage enlivened by narrative and performance in the service of Christian pedagogy, autobiography, and family history. (Ethnologie francaise, XLIII, 2013, 1, pg. 109-121)
     
    For the last eight years, since my son was three years old he and I, and later along with his younger sister, have built our own Nativity scene each December.  It is not done in the name of religious doctrine but instead a cultural tradition, adapted for our family. The children decide on the concept and I help them execute it (click here to see a slide shot of these presepi).

    Although there are abundant references to Christmas in his writing, I have yet to come across a description of a domestic Nativity scene in Angelo’s oeuvre. And indeed while my children’s notions of their presepi may look nothing like Angelo’s woodcuts, they are in the spirit of his own re-imagined Italian American Christmas expressions.

     

      

    From The Bells of Bleecker Street, Valenti Angelo, 1949

  • Life & People

    Revisiting Southern Italy through the Lens of a Future Anthropologist


     

    In 1957 Frank Cancian, a student from the U.S., spent time in the landlocked area of Irpinia—more specifically, in Lacedonia, a town in the province of Avellino.
     
    Cancian, a young photographer and future anthropologist, captured the town through still photos during an important period of transition. On the crux of modernization (centralized water came to most of the region in the late 1950s, and much of the city has been rebuilt since the 1980 Irpinia earthquake), Lacedonia played a major role in Southern Italian struggles for land rights, and became a location of continual emigration; Cancian’s photos are historical markers of a dynamic landscape and a shifting collective imaginary.

     
     
    Some of the photographs he took, with the help of a complicated set of serendipitous encounters and the Internet, were exhibited in Lacedonia in 2012 and now can be found in a beautiful bilingual book, Lacedonia: Un paese Italiano, 1957/An Italian Town, 1957 (Delta 3, 2013—to purchase the book, see below). The unexpected way the book came to be, some fifty years after the photographs were taken, are nicely described in the introductions by Antonio Pignatiello and Gerardo Ruggiero; whereas local historian Rocco Pignatiello, poet Franco Arminio (from nearby Bisaccia) and Cancian all offer reflective and historical essays that help give shape to the images. Indeed, as should be clear from this list of contributors, the book was the result of the efforts of many people, including translator Vera Tufano, book designer Doug DaSilva,  and the American, Calitri-based, photographer Angela Paolantonio.
     
    What is striking about Cancian’s photographs is that they are not typical idyllic snapshots of a quaint Italian peasant culture but features of a visual map of a community and the expressivity found within its material culture.

     
     


     
    Much of this effect comes from Cancian’s approach to portraiture: while many of his photos seem posed, their subjects nonetheless appear in true-to-life settings where Cancian happened upon them, rather than against constructed backdrops or in staged actions.

     
     
    Similarly, in an ethno-photographic mode, the images express a spontaneity and motion we associate with quotidian activities and daily routines: women washing clothes in a riverbed, men smoking in the piazza, children sitting for a classroom lesson.
     


     
    His photos take full advantage of the landscapes, both those within the buildings and streets of the town and those in farmed fields and open areas. He likewise shows a deliberate use of natural light as a way to accent, organically, all parts of Lacedonian life: work, faith, education, social life, celebration, family, etc.
     


     
    (His photos also recall for me the neorealist-style film La donnaccia, directed by Silvio Siano in 1965 and shot on location just a short distance from Lacedonia, in the town of Cairano. Both feature people and locations altered drastically by nature and human movement.)
     
    I first learned about Cancian in 2004, when a friend, the author and editor Paolo Speranza, from Avellino, asked me if I could help him track down Cancian’s early scholarly work on Lacedonia.
     
    It took a few more years before I actually met Cancian, albeit only virtually. In those years I learned that he had published (in both English and Italian) an anthropological study of Irpinia in 1961, one of a few pieces of scholarship written on the area from an American point of view. (Cancian, Frank, "The southern Italian peasant: World view and political behavior." Anthopological Quarterly, 34:1-18, 1961 and in Italian, “Il contadino meridionale"  Comportamento politico e visione del mondo." Bollettino delle Recherche Sociali, 1:258-277, 1961.)
     
    In 2006, Cancian and I started an email correspondence about our academic work and our shared interests. In that first email he explained:
     
    I worked in Lacedonia in late 1956 and the first half of 1957, under the sponsorship of Professor Tullio Tentori, a well-known Italian anthropologist.  I had finished a B.A. in philosophy in 1956 and had a Fulbright to study at the University of Rome—which I managed to formally transform into support for a project of ethnographic photography in Lacedonia.  In fall 1958 I began graduate school in social anthropology.
     
    Tentori, a leading cultural anthropologist interested in stregheria and other aspects of religion and faith healing, had collaborated on projects with Ernesto de Martino.
     
    After this experience, Cancian returned to the U.S., earned a Ph.D. in anthropology, and eventually became a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. His entire career moved between his work as a cultural anthropologist and his work as an ethnographic photographer (see Cancian's website for many of his photographs, including the Lacedonia ones).
     
    And while the bulk of his professional work focuses on Latin America and Latin American immigration to the U.S., his Italian experience seems to have informed much of his later work. Perhaps it is not surprising to learn, too, that Cancian’s family background moves between Latin America and Italy. His father was born in Brazil in 1901, was raised in the town of Vittorio Veneto, in the province of Treviso, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1923.
     
    Cancian recounts stories through his photography, images that continue to shape narratives for us today. And the literal movement of his photographs back and forth across the Atlantic, exemplified by the publication of this book, offers in and of itself other stories about how Italy gets remembered and reconstructed transnationally.
     
     

    HOW TO OBTAIN THE BOOK:
    The Pro Loco of Lacedonia published the book and sells it directly, hoping it will reach the greater Lacedonian community. Proceeds go back to the Pro Loco. It can be purchased from its website www.prolocolacedonia.com  or by emailing [email protected].  The cover price is 30 euros.
     
    Frank Cancian has a few copies he can mail to people in the United States in exchange for a contribution to help offset the cost of scanning his 1,700+ Lacedonia negatives for so as to provide sets of digital copies for Lacedonia and his files.  Email Cancian at [email protected].
     
             
     


    (All photographs courtesy of Frank Cancian.)
     

  • Art & Culture

    Revisiting Southern Italy through the Lens of a Future Anthropologist


     

    In 1957 Frank Cancian, a student from the U.S., spent time in the landlocked area of Irpinia—more specifically, in Lacedonia, a town in the province of Avellino.
     
    Cancian, a young photographer and future anthropologist, captured the town through still photos during an important period of transition. On the crux of modernization (centralized water came to most of the region in the late 1950s, and much of the city has been rebuilt since the 1980 Irpinia earthquake), Lacedonia played a major role in Southern Italian struggles for land rights, and became a location of continual emigration; Cancian’s photos are historical markers of a dynamic landscape and a shifting collective imaginary.

     
     
    Some of the photographs he took, with the help of a complicated set of serendipitous encounters and the Internet, were exhibited in Lacedonia in 2012 and now can be found in a beautiful bilingual book, Lacedonia: Un paese Italiano, 1957/An Italian Town, 1957 (Delta 3, 2013—to purchase the book, see below). The unexpected way the book came to be, some fifty years after the photographs were taken, are nicely described in the introductions by Antonio Pignatiello and Gerardo Ruggiero; whereas local historian Rocco Pignatiello, poet Franco Arminio (from nearby Bisaccia) and Cancian all offer reflective and historical essays that help give shape to the images. Indeed, as should be clear from this list of contributors, the book was the result of the efforts of many people, including translator Vera Tufano, book designer Doug DaSilva,  and the American, Calitri-based, photographer Angela Paolantonio.
     
    What is striking about Cancian’s photographs is that they are not typical idyllic snapshots of a quaint Italian peasant culture but features of a visual map of a community and the expressivity found within its material culture.

     
     


     
    Much of this effect comes from Cancian’s approach to portraiture: while many of his photos seem posed, their subjects nonetheless appear in true-to-life settings where Cancian happened upon them, rather than against constructed backdrops or in staged actions.

     
     
    Similarly, in an ethno-photographic mode, the images express a spontaneity and motion we associate with quotidian activities and daily routines: women washing clothes in a riverbed, men smoking in the piazza, children sitting for a classroom lesson.
     


     
    His photos take full advantage of the landscapes, both those within the buildings and streets of the town and those in farmed fields and open areas. He likewise shows a deliberate use of natural light as a way to accent, organically, all parts of Lacedonian life: work, faith, education, social life, celebration, family, etc.
     


     
    (His photos also recall for me the neorealist-style film La donnaccia, directed by Silvio Siano in 1965 and shot on location just a short distance from Lacedonia, in the town of Cairano. Both feature people and locations altered drastically by nature and human movement.)
     
    I first learned about Cancian in 2004, when a friend, the author and editor Paolo Speranza, from Avellino, asked me if I could help him track down Cancian’s early scholarly work on Lacedonia.
     
    It took a few more years before I actually met Cancian, albeit only virtually. In those years I learned that he had published (in both English and Italian) an anthropological study of Irpinia in 1961, one of a few pieces of scholarship written on the area from an American point of view. (Cancian, Frank, "The southern Italian peasant: World view and political behavior." Anthopological Quarterly, 34:1-18, 1961 and in Italian, “Il contadino meridionale"  Comportamento politico e visione del mondo." Bollettino delle Recherche Sociali, 1:258-277, 1961.)
     
    In 2006, Cancian and I started an email correspondence about our academic work and our shared interests. In that first email he explained:
     
    I worked in Lacedonia in late 1956 and the first half of 1957, under the sponsorship of Professor Tullio Tentori, a well-known Italian anthropologist.  I had finished a B.A. in philosophy in 1956 and had a Fulbright to study at the University of Rome—which I managed to formally transform into support for a project of ethnographic photography in Lacedonia.  In fall 1958 I began graduate school in social anthropology.
     
    Tentori, a leading cultural anthropologist interested in stregheria and other aspects of religion and faith healing, had collaborated on projects with Ernesto de Martino.
     
    After this experience, Cancian returned to the U.S., earned a Ph.D. in anthropology, and eventually became a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. His entire career moved between his work as a cultural anthropologist and his work as an ethnographic photographer (see Cancian's website for many of his photographs, including the Lacedonia ones).
     
    And while the bulk of his professional work focuses on Latin America and Latin American immigration to the U.S., his Italian experience seems to have informed much of his later work. Perhaps it is not surprising to learn, too, that Cancian’s family background moves between Latin America and Italy. His father was born in Brazil in 1901, was raised in the town of Vittorio Veneto, in the province of Treviso, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1923.
     
    Cancian recounts stories through his photography, images that continue to shape narratives for us today. And the literal movement of his photographs back and forth across the Atlantic, exemplified by the publication of this book, offers in and of itself other stories about how Italy gets remembered and reconstructed transnationally.
     
     

    HOW TO OBTAIN THE BOOK:
    The Pro Loco of Lacedonia published the book and sells it directly, hoping it will reach the greater Lacedonian community. Proceeds go back to the Pro Loco. It can be purchased from its website www.prolocolacedonia.com  or by emailing [email protected].  The cover price is 30 euros.
     
    Frank Cancian has a few copies he can mail to people in the United States in exchange for a contribution to help offset the cost of scanning his 1,700+ Lacedonia negatives for so as to provide sets of digital copies for Lacedonia and his files.  Email Cancian at [email protected].
     
             
     


    (All photographs courtesy of Frank Cancian.)
     

  • “The Mediterranean Came to Flavor My Existence”: Harry Bertoia’s Midcentury Italian American Aesthetic


     

    Earlier this year I read a post on Nick Rossi’s blog, A Modernist, about the American designer Arieto “Harry” Bertoia, whose iconic metal chairs I was familiar with but whom I had never thought about as Italian American.

     

    Nick Rossi’s piece, a thoughtful overview of Harry Bertoia as a maker of a midcentury modern aesthetic also noted, in passing, his Italian background:

     

    Bertoia was an Italian-American who had come to this country from Northern Italy (via Canada) at a young age, studied alongside some of the legends of modern design, and even spent a few years during the 1940s living in my hometown of San Diego, California.

     

    Rossi goes on to reflect on not only Bertoia’s famous chairs, but

    also his musical and sculptural experimentations. In the case of his commissioned work for Zenith, Rossi explains:

     

    All were Bertoia's attempt to provide some physical representation of the forces behind the relatively new phenomenaof television….The sculpture itself has a sheer presence that photos can barely capture. The slow alternating pulsation of the lights gives the impression of some sort of bio-mechanical organism.

     

    Rossi’s post garnered a significant comment, from Bertoia’s own daughter, Celia Bertoia; her comment further sparked my interest in Bertoia:

     

    A little history: Harry lived in Italy until age 15. In 1957, he was granted a chance to visit Italy for the first time since moving away, some 25 years later. He got so excited and gained so much energy from his journey to his former country that he began to construct huge bursting shapes. This was just one such burst, and later came the dandelions in a more refined sunburst form.

     

    And so what do we make of his Italianness?

     

    I’ve written elsewhere here about visual artists whose work does not read primarily as Italian American but whose work seems to suggest an Italian ethnic identity of some kind. It’s not about trying to recuperate Italian identities for me but rather trying to understand how artists position their work with and against their own lived experiences—consciously or not.

     

    I finally got ahold of Bertoia’s oral history, recorded on June 20, 1972, and housed at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.



    He narrates details of his relationship with many of his former art teachers as well as his peers—Charles Eames, Eero Saarinin, Florence Knoll (née Schust), Hans Knoll, and others. But he also touches on his childhood and his relationship to Italy. In those moments we might begin to consider how his creativity reflects a particular Italian ethnic midcentury sensibility.

     

    Playboy Magazine, July 1961, From left to right: George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames and Jens Risom.

    As a child and teenager in Italy (San Lorenzo, in Friuli), Bertoia recalls always drawing with whatever kind of drawing implement he could get his hands on: “even to get ahold of a pencil was very difficult.”He continues, describing that “at the age of 13 or 14, I was asked to attend a night class in the neighboring town. Our town did not have a drawing teacher” and only had a school up to the “third or fourth grade.”

     

    Detail from the Zenith Corporation installation

    He explains that his interests were not just about drawing but in construction—something that would later be echoed in his emphasis on furniture and sculpture: “my interest was in building with what kind of little material I could find, building little houses, playgrounds, constructions that were possible with what was available.”

     

    His early interest in the mechanics of building is also a thread found in his description of some of his art school training later in Michigan, when he says that at the Cranbrook School he was able to experiment with wood and metal:“I saw some of the tools that were there [at Cranbrook] and when I see tools I want to get busy with them”.

     
    A workshop at Cranbrook, 2012

    Throughout his storytelling he also recognizes ways his family supported his interest in the arts, even indirectly. I quote at length:

     

    I recall my father’s brothers (they were five brothers) had some interest in the arts. They themselves played some instruments and occasionally they would get together, chamber music you know. This to me was a great event. I would listen almost enchanted by whatever sounds they produced and during these sessions also they would talk and discuss and I always paid attention to their conversation which quite often drifted out to the arts. They would tell their personal experiences, one would visit Rome and so forth and would tell  about what he had seen and well the names of Michelangelo and so on came and to me it opened up a new world. I didn’t know really who Michelangelo was and I did not know what he did but by the sound of that conversation, by the way they presented it it surely drew my attention and I became more curious and I looked into more and more, and so whenever the occasion arose my tendency was to draw towards the arts rather than any other activity.

     

    When he emigrated to Detroit in 1930, his older brother, who was already settled in the U.S. and working as a laborer for Ford, advised him to study rather than immediately look for work: “he was very instrumental in encouraging me to go to school.” And that’s what he did. First at the Cass Technical High School in Detroit, then the Detroit Arts and Crafts School, and finally at the influential Cranbrook School.

     

    (As an aside, he also explains that he was not drafted into the U.S. army during WW II because of a complication with his residency documents: “It turned out that my entry to Detroit was by way of Canada and the destination was Windsor and not Detroit and therefore this made my entry into the United States illegal and so this had to be ironed out”.)





    Commissioned Bertoia "wall screen" that used to be at 510 Fifth Avenue, New York City

     

    In this retelling of his life, Bertoia reflects briefly on the trip that his daughter notes on Rossi’s blog post. After 30 years, he returned to an Italy that he did not know at all; not so much because of the changes that had occurred in Italy, but because as a youth he had only experienced what was accessible to him by bicycle.

     

    And this really was to me so wonderful because for the first time I began to sense that continuity that existed all along, from the Greek spirit, southern Italy and other parts, in other words the Mediterranean came to flavor my existence, and the few coastal towns I saw I thought each one just a dream. Amalfi, Sorrento, just beautiful. The light was so enchanting as a matter of fact that I couldn’t possibly find it conducive to work. You know work requires an amount of battling and the light is so beautiful it would have to be observed, waste time in watching it. Italy was that enchanted portion of my life—brief as it was but still meaningful.

     

    The references here to how his travels informed his future work are pretty abstract —made more concrete by his daughter’s reference to the “huge bursting shapes” he went on to construct. The meaning of this “enchanted portion” of his work is an aspect of Bertoia’s oeuvre still to be unpacked as we develop new ways of conceptualizing Italian American visual culture.

     


    Bertoia in his studio


    [Special thank you to Jeanne V. Diller and the Oakland Public Library.]

     

  • Life & People

    Italian American Monuments, Gramsci-style


     

    “In the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.”

    - Walter Benjamin

     

     

    Thomas Hirschhorn’s temporary Gramsci Monument, constructed mainly out of plywood in the middle of Forest Houses, a public housing development in the Bronx, seems to be in the press almost daily this summer. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldal wildly praises it as “art in the mind,” whereas the New York Times’s Ken Johnson characterizes it as “dismally decrepit.”

     

    My concern, instead, is in imagining the monument as part of a larger fabric of Italian Americanness in New York City and to reflect on its redefinition of what a monument is or what a “work in public space” (as Hirschhorn has called it) means.

     

    The entire concept of the monument—a temporary structure built in an unusual location, in the name of an influential thinker, with the stated goal of rethinking dominant philosophical ideas and incite dialogue—intrigues and energizes.

     

     


    Outside one of the Forest Houses buildings

    On the monument’s website, reprinted mainly in stark red and green into a

    neatly folded pamphlet available on site, Hirschhorn has created a criss-crossing tagged map of its inspirations and development. The result is a dizzying, text-heavy connect-the-dots of places, people, and ideas.

     

    When I read through the pamphlet-map I am inevitably drawn to the parts that read Italian—and I don’t just mean the fact that he calls the lottery that will be held when the monument comes down tombola. Instead, there is a subtle way that for me Hirschhorn has marked his “presence and production artwork” (another way he has described the space) as part of a larger Italian diasporic cultural manifestation in the city.

     

    In one corner of the map, marked in green capital letters are other monuments (all variations on the standard statue variety) in New York City made to Italians: Verdi, Garibaldi, Dante, and Verrazzano.  He’s added Gramsci to the map, constructing both a novel parallel between these other Italian figures and Gramsci and countering the drastically different ways they have been memorialized in the States.  Adding Gramsci in this context certainly reads as a politicized gesture.

     

     

    Detail of The Gramsci Monument Map/Pamphlet

    Hirschhorn, though, leaves off of his map a number of other Italian monuments to be found throughout the five boroughs (i.e., there are at least three permanent monuments to Antonio Meucci to be found in the city*). And I find it particularly revealing that Hirschhorn did not tag New York City's Christopher Columbus statue on his map (a space recently reshaped by an artist which received comparable media attention).

     

    Less surprisingly, Hirschhorn also left off of his map a number of other kinds of Italian American monuments found throughout the city, sites that are, like the Gramsci Monument, similarly impermanent or otherwise not conventionally read as monuments (i.e., the yearly chalked memorials to the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto in Staten Island, or the yearly, temporary tower built for the Festa del Giglio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn).

     

    All of these monuments and spaces (those on or off Hirschhorn’s map) representing in different ways Italians in New York were constructed with at least some support from Italian American individuals or organizations.

     

    And here lies another way, then, that the Gramsci Monument is woven into a pre-existing Italian American cultural narrative. Near the other side of the map/pamphlet lies a bubble describing the separate constructed details of the monument (archive, library, bar, Internet corner, etc.). The first, the archive, is tied via a blue line to a copy of a business card, for Dr. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Dean of theJohn D. Calandra Italian American Institute of CUNY Queens College.  In fact, Calandra supplied some significant portion of the books on loan to Forest Houses as well as some of the other ephemera at the monument.

     

     


    Part of the Gramsci Archive and Library

    Calandra’s involvement both supports the institutional structure behind the monument (along with the Dia Art Foundation—who footed the bill, the Gladstone Gallery, the Casa Museo di Antonio Gramsci in Sardegna, etc.) and, for me, further strengthens its connection to an Italian American notion of identity, aesthetics, and history.  That it boosts Calandra’s leftist cred and connects it to the international art world shouldn’t go unnoticed as it counters the staid position of far too many Italian American organizations as solely invested in retrograde identity politics rather than serious and engaged cultural work such as that which Calandra supports.

     

    (That Dia has its own historical connection to Italian Americans vis-à-vis former chairman Leonard Riggio goes unmentioned here although it’d be a stretch to connect that history with this current project.)

     

     


    "Antonio Lounge" at the Gramsci Monument






    Gramsci's slippers on display in the Bronx

    (on loan from the Casa Museo di Antonio Gramsci)

     

    And the idea that the monument is cultural work and that Hirschhorn is an artist, not an activist, brings me to the significant Gramscian angle in this new way of being a monument (to riff off of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s line, “a new way of being Gramscian”).

     

    The Forest Houses Gramsci Monument is impermanent. In September it will be dismantled, becoming a physical unraveling of the hegemonic need for “durable admiration” (a la David Hume). Instead Hirschhorn has created a monument to Gramsci that is alive and thus fleeting.

     

    The site asks us to experience it in the here and now.  It asks us to make of it what we want, pulling most profoundly from the Sardinian thinker’s discussions on the potential within the routine of everyday life and within every individual to reposition the dynamics of power and resistance.

     

    I visited the monument on a weekday in July.

     



    Pleasantly surprised author upon finding herself in The Gramsci Monument Newspaper
    (no.22, July 22, 2013)

     

    It was hot and muggy—a thunderstorm was on its way—but there was a buzz in the air beyond the cicadas. It was not crowded but a woman was sitting at the small Gramsci Bar, kids filled the Workshop Space, teenagers were clicking away in the Internet Corner, hip hop was bumping from the radio station, a few other visitors were roaming about, noshing on fresh apples picked up from the basket left in the library, snapping photos of the banners and the like.

     

    I ran into Hirschhorn outside of the library and we chatted a bit. “It’s a different kind of monument,” he began. In his artist statement he clarifies:

     

    I try to make a new kind of monument. A precarious monument. A monument for a limited time. I make monuments for philosophers because they have something to say today. Philosophy can give the courage to think, the pleasure to reflect.

     

    When I asked him the question that many are asking: “So what do the locals think of this? What’s the reaction been?” he refused to speak for others, encouraging me to ask them myself. But I knew that the answers could not be found so simply.

     

    This problematic was one I was personally familiar with as it had played out for me in a project I was a part of in Southern Italy in 2010 with other academics and artists in the small, rural village of Cairano (province, Avellino). (See Raffaele Maglione's photographs of the Carro Migrante, Migrant's Cart, and other happenings from Cairano 7x.) 

     

    The effect of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument will not be visible in any singular way. It matters not at all that in the initial building of the monument only one Forest House resident, Erik Farmer, it seems even picked up Gramsci’s books to read.

     

    In fact, the desire to think, create, or act because of the Gramsci Monument in the end has very little to do with Gramsci’s words from prison. But rather it lies in the day-to-day witnessing of the physical transformation of a city landscape—created by Hirschhorn and the residents of Forest Houses who have together momentarily placed a humanitarian thinker who died in prison at the hands of a Fascist dictator at the center of a major U.S. inner-city neighborhood.  The Southern Question has emigrated to the South Bronx.

     

    It is an improbable juxtaposition. It is an aesthetics of hope. 

     

    ~ Many thanks to Mike Henry. ~



    * Information for the three sites memorializing Meucci can be found at the following three websites: http://nysosia.org/museum.html, http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/B242/history, and http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Meucci_Triangle_monument_jeh.JPG.

     

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