I Am(s): Dantesque Strategies of Acceptance and Denial and a Proposal

There have been major breakthroughs in recent years in the research on Italian American culture and history. The quality and amount of work and critical thought has not only shed a new light on the relevance of that experience, but suggested new ways of looking at, and reflecting on, the complexity of an in-between culture and the epistemological challenges that this entails. In this context, can we speak of an “Italianist” point of view? Can we try to offer a picture, and indicate a few points of a tentative agenda, wading our way between the Scylla and Charybdis of the sanctimonious silence of bona fide Italian literary studies, and the sanctimonious rising discourse on Italy as the site of new forms of immigrant subjectivity? At present, there is a strident and disconcerting dissonance in the orientations of studies, depending on their provenance. This contribution aims at illustrating at least some aspects of a scenario where researchers seem engaged in a dialogue of the deaf. Is there a common ground, or is each one of us actually paying tribute to his/her academic tradition?