Loredana Polezzi (Stony Brook University, State University of New York)

For a diasporic community, memory is both a vital resource and a contested space. The experience of migration ties individuals and groups to multiple places, times, languages, cultural practices, … with memory acting as the ‘glue’ that keeps a sense of identity together: there are ‘old’ and ‘host’ countries; ancestors and family trees; inherited, invented and learned tongues (but also recipes, songs, beliefs, …). Memory helps us to thread together the beads that make up our distinctive experiences and also tie us to others, both close by and far away.

Yet memory has its mirror in forgetfulness. We do not have the capacity for total recall and that brings both relief (we remember selectively, we have the ability to forget) and anxiety (we fear that distance will make us forget important people or places, we feel ashamed when we fail to remember them). All memory is partial—that is fragmented, incomplete, but also influenced by different perspectives and points of view. That does not make memory a less powerful instrument, nor does it mean that all memories are false, misleading, or untrustworthy. It would be impossible to hold on to a sense of self and community, of belonging and culture, without memory, with its constant working and reworking of events. Yet we must also remember that memory is always situated, that the narratives it produces will inevitably contain both clichés and blind spots and that those tales will always be subject to interpretation or appropriation.

The story of Italian Americans, like that of other migrant and diasporic communities, is built on such selective memories and the complex narratives they produce.

At a subjective level, there are the individual memories of one’s own life: the stories we tell about ourselves and how we came to be who we are. These include the experiences we remember from early childhood, or our ability to recall significant places and events from different phases of our lives, the smell and taste of favorite foods, the faces of people we loved, but also images we associate with pain and loss. This list intentionally points to the fact that, while we often associate memory with storytelling, remembering is multi-sensorial: it can embrace sound, vision, smell, tact, taste. Through these sensations, we construct and maintain a sense of self, of subjective identity. It is not by chance, then, that a large section of Italian American writing (especially but not exclusively in its early phases) takes the form of memoirs, life writing, and other autobiographical genres; or that within those works as well as in cinema or visual art, cooking and other material practices frequently appear, evoking feelings, sensations, locations and people from the past. Many if not all the contributions in anthologies such as The Dream Book (1985) or The Milk of Almonds (2002) testify to this link between memory and the senses.

The fact that memory and its narratives are involved in constructing our sense of identity also points to the dynamic, flexible, and mutable nature of our perception of ourselves—something that makes it more appropriate to talk of identification rather than of a fixed identity. Over time, our own image of ourselves evolves, with the memory of ‘who I was’ or ‘where I came from’ forming an integral part of ‘who I am’, ‘where I am now’, ‘where I am going’. In autobiographical narratives, migration often represents a pivotal point for the individual who is looking back at their own past: a moment of transformation marking an important passage, but often also a trauma, a split. The imposition of a new language, for instance, can produce a sense of loss and mark a caesura between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ that feel difficult to reconcile, to hold together as part of one story. Not all migratory experiences are marked by loss, however: they can also be read in terms of renewal and enrichment, as we inhabit new spaces, acquire new languages, become familiar with new locations and cultural practices – and build new memories.

Italian American cultural production is rich in both types of tales, which can be described through the well-worn labels of rag-to-riches and failed migration stories. In these narratives, memory is often inflected through the additional lens of class, or gender: see, for example, the two very different tales told in Jerre Mangione’s classic Mount Allegro (1943) and Giovanna Miceli-Jeffries’ recent Bitter Trades (2018). Sometimes tales of success and failure actually co-exist, as in the case of Stanley Tucci’s Big Night (1996), where the story of two Italian-born brothers and their diverging relationship to both Italy and the US results in very different life choices by the end of the film.

Subjective memories are not built in isolation, though. Rather, they are always formed in a particular context and have a strong interpersonal dimension. Not all our memories are strictly our own and even our sense of self, our identity or identification, is constantly negotiated with others. Besides our individual memories, we have those we share with others or we inherit from them. These can be family memories or memories that connect us to other small circles: our school friends, our workmates, fellow members of a union or a fan group. In diasporic communities, in particular, intergenerational tales trace roots and routes, commemorate ancestors, celebrate achievements, or lament losses.

Interpersonal memory forms a shared archive which is made of images and tales, of gestures and objects. Like all archives, shared memories are stored and protected, sometimes hidden, at other times celebrated and repeatedly, almost ritually displayed. They are the photographs kept in albums and the recipes prepared for special occasions, the necklace or the embroidered linen passed down from mother to daughter (or son), and the joint visit (real, or perhaps only spoken about) to a distant ‘homeland’. B. Amore’s artworks – especially her 2001 Ellis Island exhibition ”Life Line /Filo della vita” and the book that documents it, An Italian American Odyssey: Life Line – filo della vita (2006) – provide a wealth of visual representations of this shared archive, turning everyday objects and family heirlooms into a journey that takes us from personal to family, ethnic and then more broadly diasporic memory.

As the archive of shared memory accumulates and solidifies, so do its blind spots and its representations of the past. Family narratives may enshrine the heroic figure of ancestors (the grandparents or great-grandparents who left Italy to cross the Atlantic) or repeat the trauma of migration (narrated as a tale of exile, separation, discrimination, or assimilation). Infused with the nostalgic light of memory and its selective power, those stories as well as the practices associated with them can become sclerotic, rigidly reproducing a pattern and imposing an interpretation which does not allow rewritings or counterarguments. Stereotypical images of Italian American culture and associated behaviors abound in literature as much as in cinema and TV, as do testimonies of the struggle to escape them— especially among women artists, from Helen Barolini’s Umbertina (1979) to Nancy Savoca’s Household Saints (1993) or Lady Gaga’s performance as her male Italian American alter ego, Joe Calderone, at the 2011 VMAs. Similarly, myths of the ‘old country’ or the (mostly failed) search for roots are a recurrent trope in memoirs such as Susan Caperna Lloyd’s No Pictures in My Grave (1992) or Mary Taylor Simeti’s On Persephone’s Island (1986), and also in TV series ranging from The Sopranos to Jersey Shore or Cake Boss.¹

The contested, at times antagonistic nature of family memory and of the archives that enshrine it becomes all the more apparent when additional factors come into play. This is evidenced in the written and the filmic work of Kym Ragusa, who identifies as African Italian American. Her memoir, The Skin Between Us (2006), and her earlier short films, Passing (1996) and Outside / Fuori (1997), are a personal testimony to what it meant to grow up as a mixed-race child, feeling constantly excluded from her father’s Italian American family, their history and their story-telling. In Ragusa’s work, the blind spots of family memory are exposed and made public: there are very few photos of Kym in that archive, while the traumatic experiences of exclusion and abuse that affected her Italian American grandmother, Gilda, were often erased or removed, only to then reemerge in moments of unguarded revelation: flashes of memory cutting through the ravages of Alzheimer’s. While trauma may be an explanation for her family’s behavior, though, it is not an acceptable justification for her father’s violence and substance abuse, or her grandmother’s racism (of which Kym was herself a target).

Considerations of race and racism take us to a further dimension of memory and its role in Italian American culture. This is the public memory associated with collective agency, with communities, associations, and authorities. Public memory ‘memorializes’ a story and makes it official. It records landmark events and selects emblematic stories, whether of success or of resilience in the face of unfair treatment. It builds monuments and memorials, celebrates annual feasts and centenaries, endorses exhibitions, permanent museum collections, prizes, and other initiatives. All these acts require the work of memory: first to select the stories to be remembered, then to construct narratives, maintain them, and pass them on. Because of its visibility and its official status, public memory can be particularly antagonistic and is often the site of both propaganda and disputes. Who has the right to decide what is to be remembered and celebrated? What should we do with blind spots or with contested narratives, alternative stories, and resistant voices, as they emerge over time? Two very different approaches to these questions are represented, in the case of Italian American culture and its history, by the dispute over the events and monuments celebrating Columbus, on the one hand, and by the development of oral history projects recording the living memory of community members, such as the Bronx Italian American History Initiative, on the other.

Projects such as the ‘Bronx Initiative’ also point to the increasing importance of digital archives in the formation and preservation of diasporic memory. And that, in turn, raises a further question about the reciprocity or perhaps the multiplying of memory, as we attempt to retell the diasporic history of Italian America from a more inclusive and diverse perspective. On the one hand, digital tools allow us to foreground the complex network of connections that are an integral part of the Italian American experience, linking it to the wider narrative of migration to the US, to the question of whiteness, to the history of racism, and to the proximities created at the intersection between migration and class or labor conditions.² On the other hand, as demonstrated by recent initiatives promoted by the Centro Altreitalie, the virtual spaces created by digital tools allow us to connect the different locations of the Italian diaspora, studying its trajectories from Australia to Northern Europe—or, indeed, across the Americas.

In this increasingly complex—but also rich, dialogical, and at least potentially more inclusive—interweaving of memories, Italy, too, must rethink its position. Largely silent and forgetful towards its history of migration and the diasporic communities it produced, Italy is often tempted by the rhetoric of return journeys and the search for roots, or, worse, by the temptation to reframe the memory of migration as a celebration of essentialized notions of ‘Italianness’ and ‘Italian greatness.’ At the time of writing, the most recent attempt to establish an official role for the history of the Italian diaspora in Italy takes the form of a proposed new law aiming to promote the teaching of the history of migration in Italian schools. The proposal, presented in Fall 2022 by four Members of Parliament elected by diasporic Italian constituencies, describes Italian migration as “un inestimabile patrimonio di vissuto e di relazioni umane, di pratiche d’integrazione, di confronto interculturale, di contaminazioni identitarie e di vincoli di solidarietà.³” Its memory, the four proponents state, should become an integral part of a broader intercultural approach to education in and for the contemporary world. That approach, if it becomes pedagogic practice, must underline how memory is not a sterile celebration of a sanitized past, but a shared as well as continuously contested future-making practice.

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