#26425 – Italian American LLC Guaranteed Session Call for Papers

Title: Italoamericanos: The Italian Diasporic Experience in the Americas

New Orleans has for centuries been a port of call and interstitial space beckoning people to its banks, whether through choice, coercion, or bondage.

For the Italian diaspora, New Orleans has been one of the nodal points on a map that spans the full length of the Americas, from Canada to Patagonia and across Central America, the Caribbean and the Southern US States. This history is part of a wider, global set of trajectories and  part of a long durée that takes us from the so-called age of exploration to the current day. The trajectories of Italian migration trace an intricate web of material culture and practices, artistic and intellectual influence, linguistic and, more broadly, cultural creation and recreation.  This panel aims to explore those practices and their complex circulation across a variety of locations, historical moments, and social formations.

We invite papers that investigate any of the following themes:

• The Italian diaspora in the Americas: histories, routes and narratives
• The (changing)  social positioning of Italians
• Italians as agents of change and/or tradition
• Identity and its ‘anchoring’ in material and immaterial practices
• Question of (multiple)  belonging, affect and identification
• Place, space and nostalgia
• Resilience and adaptation
• Social interactions and forms of solidarity
• Cultural Practices and Rituals
• Representations, perceptions and stereotypes
• Cultural and transcultural creativity
• Languaging & translanguaging
• The “color line”

Please send 250-word abstract and 75-word bio to Anthony Mitzel (anthonydion.mitzel@unibo.it ), Loredana Polezzi (loredana.polezzi@stonybrook.edu), and Colleen Ryan (ryancm@indiana.edu) by March 15, 2024.