What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Italian American Studies – Now

Abstract

This article tries to draw a summary picture of the current trends in the field of Italian American Studies, of their “globalization” in terms of diasporic studies, of the role Italian individual researchers and organizations have gained inside the field, and of its possible future developments. The occasion for this sort of assessment of the state of the art and of the meaning(s) of “Italian American” Studies has been the second Trascending Borders, Bridging Gaps meeting organized in January 2018 by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at the City University of New York (the first one was a major international conference in Bellagio, in 2014), which saw the participation of a number of scholars for the USA, Italy and the UK. Both events somehow marked significant turns in the definition of what we talk about when we talk about Italian American Studies, starting from the questioning of any easy and monolithically reified definition of “Italian” and “American,” as witnessed by a number of recent publications, and fostered the ever-growing collaboration between the two sides of the Atlantic, culminating in important international conferences organized in Italy and in the creation of new research centers such as the Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi ItaloAmericani at the University of Macerata.