La donna africana ed il colonialismo italiano in Africa Orientale (Italian Edition)

Colonialismo italiano

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He was very familiar with the Italian and Jewish quarters in NY in the 30s and 40s. Another example is Miles Davis, the Porgy and Bess LP, capturing the sounds of the Charleston, South Carolina food vendors, an intersection of sound and soulfulness, eating and talking, the pleasure of the table, the pleasure of conviviality.

Italians food vendors were a very important part of the American cities and of their soundscape back in those days. The fish vendor, the fruit man … they would cry out to let others know they were selling. There a palpable affiliation between the sound and the food. They are literally in the soundscape of the American cities, and that was associated with black, Italian and Jewish culture. The hard work, a common topic: The people who built the modern cities of this country had bodies made for production. When they became sports figures they became objects of visual consumption, sport heroes.

Today, Italian Americans have a very prominent role in US basketball culture, not so much as players but coaches, broadcasters, and marketers. Sports media in this country have a large presence of Italian Americans, in radio shows, television broadcasting and such. It goes back to what I told you about food: Talking about Italian Americans in baseball, you may not recognize many names of Italian American athletes nowadays: The number of Italian great baseball players in the 40s, 50s and 60s was very high, like Latino players today.

Is there a difference in how this relationship developed over the decades, if we look at this from a geographic point of view? The book is largely based in the Northeast, where I grew up. I talk about New Orleans in the first part of the book because of the history I learned there about the development of jazz. There is a big intersection between those groups in these places. It happened the same way in Chicago and Saint Louis, in the Midwest.

For similar reasons, there were migrations largely for industrial labor but there was also a development of culture as well in the California cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. These groups live in neighborhoods that are next to each other, and sometimes they are in conflict. I concentrated my research on the Northeast because of my time living in places like Philadelphia, the lower East Side of Manhattan, Jersey City, and Brooklyn, and these are locations that became the template for Hollywood representations of ethnicity.

We see it in The Godfather and all the gangster movies, in Rocky and Saturday Night Fever , in the earliest films of Spike Lee, which I spotlight in a chapter of the book. Which were the main topics of opposition and conflict between African American and Italian American cultures? I mentioned earlier the discrimination Italians faced in the early years of the century.

The Italians were racially ambiguous, somewhere in between white and black, or tenuously on either side of the color line. If they went to school, they went to segregated schools with African American children. In America, almost by definition, the formula to achieve whiteness is to put a border between yourself and blackness, and to develop an identity which is in opposition, oftentimes in violent opposition, to the black Other.

Some of the Italian Americans who remained in the cities became resentful of African Americans and Latinos. In the suburbs they developed a deep investment in the meaning of home and property, and they saw African Americans and Latinos coming to these areas as threats to the value of property, and as criminals.

Ethiopian‑Italians

There was just as much criminality in the Italian neighborhoods as in the black neighborhoods and the Latino neighborhoods. There were gang wars between these ethnic groups. When the civil rights movement developed in this country, many Italian Americans were part of the resistance, particularly if the civil right African Americans chose to exercise was to move into an Italian American neighborhood.

Not all felt that way: But there also were a lot of conservative, reactionary Italian Americans that stood up for segregation. Some neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Newark and Chicago became like the American South, with white families not wanting black children in the same schools as their children, and not wanting black or Latino neighbors because they believed that their property values were going to diminish. Let's talk about people. Which are the most important names, on both sides, who left a mark on this relation between two cultures?

Sinatra was a great hero for the African American musicians. He was a strong anti-racist leader. He played in Gary, Indiana, when hundreds of white students at Froebel School in walked out of their classes to protest African American students …. He had a very robust sense of integration. There were also African American writers who became interested in the Italian American community. Most of the great African American writers of fiction from the s used Italian or Italian American characters, because they knew them, they lived in the same neighborhoods.

James Baldwin is an example: He moved to the Greenwich Village, into a mostly Italian neighborhood, and he filled his novels with Italian American characters. Albert Murray was another African American writer, very important for the history of blues and jazz. More recently, film actor Robert De Niro has had several romantic relationships with African American women.

One of them is the actor Giancarlo Esposito, of whom I wrote about in the book because of his extensive work with Spike Lee. She wrote a beautiful book, The Skin Between Us, a memoir.

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His best friends and worst enemies were Italian, and you see that reflected in the movies, where there are Italian characters who are really racist and others who have a fluency and an ease with black culture. These are some of the key figures I write about in the book. His name was Ficre Ghabreyesus.

He was an immigrant to the US from Eritrea. He grew up as part of the Italian colonial system in East Africa, was educated by Italian nuns, spoke fluent Italian, fought in the civil war between Eritrea and Ethiopia and lost a brother in that war. He and two other brothers came to the US in the late s and opened a great restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut. New Haven was a great Italian-Black city, with a very strong tradition of both cultures.

He was a wonderful man. Unfortunately, he died several years ago just after his 50th birthday, because of a heart condition. He was married to the great African American poet and scholar, Elizabeth Alexander, who introduced me to my wife twenty years ago: He had such a great command of the language and of the cuisine, he was a student of Italian history and architecture. He made me think in a more international way of this relationship between Africans and Italians. Let's talk about the present. Unfortunately, because of a new great wave of immigration, Italy seems to have a problem with Africa, in this very moment.

What's the status of the relations between Italian Americans and African Americans, today?

I travel there regularly and I hope to bring my daughters there. They are adopted from the northern region of Ethiopia, close to the border with Eritrea. I was very hopeful about this relationship. After the period of violence in NYC, years of deep conflict between the communities, there have been hopeful signs of reconciliation.

I see this in college classrooms in particular. Certain Italian American politicians have been in the forefront of the anti-immigration hysteria. This is very, very dangerous. Perhaps with the support of great people like you, there will be an Italian publisher who becomes interested in translating and publishing the book.

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I would love to have many more Italian readers, and to come to Italy to discuss the book! Italian America at Its African American Edge", che racconta molto bene un aspetto importante dell'esperienza italoamericana. John Gennari, autore di questo bellissimo libro. Ciao John, benvenuto su We the Italians. Le culture afroamericana e italoamericana si influenzano a vicenda da molto tempo, come ci insegna il tuo libro.

Da un punto di vista generale, questi due popoli sono al centro di due grandi migrazioni: Fu un ingrediente assolutamente necessario nella costruzione del Nuovo Mondo. Erano gli anni dell'industrializzazione e la modernizzazione dell'America nel Nord Est, nel Midwest e anche nel West, lo sviluppo dell'industria delle costruzioni, la produzione e lo sviluppo delle metropolitane: Ma questi popoli furono fondamentali anche per lo sviluppo dell'industria culturale in questo Paese: Mi riferisco a persone come Rudolph Valentino ed Enrico Caruso, e poi ad altri artisti come Frank Sinatra, ai grandi maestri afroamericani come Louis Armstrong, ai grandi musicisti di rhythm and blues degli anni '40 e ' Potresti descrivere ai nostri lettori lo sviluppo di questa relazione su tutti questi diversi argomenti?

Il blues afroamericano ha il tipo di feeling che assomiglia a molti brani del Sud Italia, la musica e la cultura della canzone napoletana, una passione musicale, una malinconia. Quelle persone avevano sofferto molto, ma erano riuscite a trasformare la sofferenza in gioia e indulgenza, in piaceri del corpo: Musica e cibo, canto, ballo e cibo Nella musica, nel cinema, nello sport e nelle altre pratiche espressive che esploro nel mio libro. Ci sono indicazioni che gli afroamericani abbiano influenzato gli italoamericani, o viceversa?

Caruso era napoletano, venne negli Stati Uniti e fu una figura di grande importanza per la divulgazione dell'opera lirica.

Ma quei dischi di Caruso furono ascoltati da giovani afroamericani, in particolare da persone come Louis Armstrong e Sidney Bechet, e poi da altri grandi trombettisti e cantanti. L'opera ha avuto una grande influenza sul primo jazz. Penso che l'assolo di jazz sia come un'aria nell'opera.

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