In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen [Paperback]

In the Name of the Mother examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. Samuele Pardini links African American literature to the Mediterranean tradition of the Italian immigrants and examines both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism in the West. This previously unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable of producing democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy. This volume emphasizes the racial in-betweenness of Italian Americans rearticulated as invisible blackness, a view that enlarges and complicates the color-based dimensions of American racial discourse. This strikingly original work will interest a wide spectrum of scholars in American Studies and the humanities.

SAMUELE F. S. PARDINI is an associate professor at Elon University.

Acknowledgments Introduction New World, Old Woman: Or, Modernity Upside Down Rochester, Sicily: The Political Economy of Italian American Life and the Encounter with Blackness Structures of Invisible Blackness: Racial Difference, (Homo)Sexuality, and Italian American Identity in African American Literature during Jim Crow In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Gun: Modernity as the Gangster In the Name of the Mother: The Other Italian American Modernity The Dago and the Darky: Staging Subversion Notes Bibliography Index