A Hero and His Newspaper
Unsettling Myths of Italian America
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11271893 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sarah H Salter (Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 108-133 |
| Publication date | 2020-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlaa019 |
| OpenAlex | W3024493323 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 32 |
Italian American ethnic identity has long been constituted by struggles and inequalities endured by Italians in post-unification rural Italy and their subsequent racialized oppression in urban centers of the US North in the era of mass migration. Until now, the presumed stability of mass migration identity has created the general terms for understanding Italian America. In this essay, a New Orleans microhistory illuminated through the 1849 newspaper Il Monitore del Sud, the first Italian-language newspaper published in the United States, reshapes foundational understandings of Italian American identity. The newspaper's antebellum account of New Orleans Italian America includes nationalist aesthetic expressions and political affiliations that American political discourse has not yet found an adequate language to describe and that Italian American studies has not yet confronted. In bringing this prehistory to light, my work with antebellum Italian Americans complicates understandings of multi-ethnic collectivity by examining how intercultural myth-making underwrites communal historiography. Together, the ethnic perceptions memorialized in Il Monitore del Sud and the power operations revealed in concurrent civic records expose how collective conditions of white supremacy come to be naturalized and forgotten, becoming history's flotsam. The creation of Italian America's communal historiography, I argue, shows us something larger about the operations of US white supremacy: how its emotional logic depends simultaneously on the exploitation of vulnerable others and the enactment of vulnerability from within the exploiting group
Aesthetics · Art · Collective identity · Ethnic group · HERO · Historiography · Identity (music) · Literature · Media studies · Mythology · Nationalism · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Racism · Sociology · White supremacy · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society
Making Italian America
Are Italians White?
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh
The Risorgimento and Italian history
The View from Vesuvius
Italian Immigrant Radical Culture
Buried Caesars, and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing
Imagining Italians
Italy's Many Diasporas
A World Not to Come
A Great Conspiracy against Our Race
La Storia
The Italians in America before the Civil War
Creole New Orleans
Bread and Respect
Half Bitter, Half Sweet
Creole New Orleans
Building Little Italy
Reinventing Free Labor
To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate
Print Culture in a Diverse America
How the Irish Became White
Building Little Italy
Reinventing Free Labor
Metaphors, Mamma, and Meatballs
The Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People
Venus in Two Acts
The Machiavellian Moment
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |