Guest Speakers
In February, Jim Bregante a long time resident of San Diego, spoke to us about his experience of growing up Little Italy in the 1940s and 1950s.
In March,John Gennari, Professor of English and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont, presented entitled "The House We Live In: Sinatra in the Age of Trump" where he considered the complex legacy of Frank Sinatra in the context of current political and cultural dissension. These were some of the questions he addressed: What is the resonance of Sinatra’s performance in the WWII-era propaganda film The House I Live In, a paean to anti-bigotry and national unity, in our own time of deep division over issues of race, immigration, and citizenship? How do we make sense of Sinatra’s work along edges and borders (masculinity/femininity, white/black, ethnic outsider/celebrity insider, Democrat/Republican) in the wake of #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, and other roiling currents of the moment? If Frank Sinatra is still in our house, what tune is he singing to us?
In April, Teresa Fiore, the Inserra Endowed Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies at Montclair State University, delivered a entitled "Pre-occupied Spaces: Remapping Italian Transnational Migrations and Culture in Europe, Africa and the Americas"
adapted from her recent book Pre-occupied Spaces (Fordham UP 2017), in which she posed Italy as a unique laboratory to rethink national belonging and participation at large in our era of massive demographic mobility. She analyzed Italy's formation and development on a transnational map spanning the Mediterranean and the Americas through the interrogation of cultural texts addressing travel and living spaces. By demonstrating how contemporary demographic movement in Italy today is preoccupied by its past emigration and imperialism, the lecture aimed at stressing commonalities and dispelling the preoccupations that are increasingly accompanying discussions about migrants in the European Union as well as at the global level.