Italy's residents are a migratory people. Since 1800 well over 27 million left home, but over half also returned home again. As cosmopolitans, exiles, and 'workers of the world' they transformed their homeland and many of the countries where they worked or settled abroad. But did they form a diaspora? Migrants maintained firm ties to native villages, cities and families. Few felt much loyalty to a larger nation of Italians. Rather than form a 'nation unbound,' the transnational lives of Italy's migrants kept alive international regional cultures that challenged the hegemony of national states around the world. This ambitious and theoretically innovative overview examines the social, cultural and economic integration of Italian migrants. It explores their complex yet distinctive identity and their relationship with their homeland taking a comprehensive approach.

In the century between 1870 and 1970, about twenty-seven million migrants left Italy to work and live abroad. As a result, the worldwide Italian diaspora reportedly numbers more than sixty million people. Until now, however, there has not been an anthology devoted to the literature of the Italian diaspora that places it in a global context. This landmark volume presents a truly international selection of works by more than seventy Italian-language poets who are writing in countries from Australia to Venezuela. Their poetry is collected here into eleven geographical regions. The history and current state of Italian-language poetry in each region receives a critical overview by a knowledgeable scholar, who also introduces each poet and provides a bibliography of his or her work. All poems appear on facing pages in both Italian and English. Poets of the Italian Diaspora is part of a long-range project, by the editors and contributors, to expand the boundaries of the Italian literary canon.

Italy's residents are a migratory people. Since 1800 well over 27 million left home, but over half also returned home again. As cosmopolitans, exiles, and 'workers of the world' they transformed their homeland and many of the countries where they worked or settled abroad. But did they form a diaspora? Migrants maintained firm ties to native villages, cities and families. Few felt much loyalty to a larger nation of Italians. Rather than form a 'nation unbound,' the transnational lives of Italy's migrants kept alive international regional cultures that challenged the hegemony of national states around the world. This ambitious and theoretically innovative overview examines the social, cultural and economic integration of Italian migrants. It explores their complex yet distinctive identity and their relationship with their homeland taking a comprehensive approach.

Bound by Distance takes its place among a growing body of scholarship the goal of which is to challenge the kind of thinking that reproduces the "West" as a stable and homogenous political and discursive entity. The Italian nation, with its peculiar process of formation, the continuous tensions between its own northern and southern regions, and its history of emigration, provides an important case for complicating and reassessing concepts of national, racial, economic, and cultural dominance. The author analyzes the interactive space of the history of Italian state formation, Italian subaltern literature, Italian emigrant writing, and the current situation of North African and Asian immigrants to Italy, in order to contest the "feigned homogeneity" of the Italian nation and to complicate and reassess concepts of national, racial, economic, and cultural dominance.

This book investigates the experiences of second- and third-generation Italians living in South Africa, exploring how nostalgia for Italy influences their sense of identity and belonging. The Italian community in South Africa is a unique diaspora, with a complex history, including roots in Italian colonial activities in Africa, and in World War II. This book looks at how the descendants of these early migrants take pride in being Italian and value the Italian language. They also ascribe much importance to their family roots, and have often created a romanticized image of Italy, mostly based on childhood vacation visits. The longing for an imaginary idealized version of Italy is closely linked to their wider search for a sense of identity and belonging against the backdrop of South African society, currently still grappling with its own multicultural identity. Interdisciplinary by design, this book draws on insights from both cultural studies and psychology in order to shine a light on an important and under-studied diasporic community. The book will be of interest to scholars from across migration studies and the Humanities in general. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Italian immigrants to the United States and Argentina hungered for the products of home. Merchants imported Italian cheese, wine, olive oil, and other commodities to meet the demand. The two sides met in migrant marketplaces—urban spaces that linked a mobile people with mobile goods in both real and imagined ways. Elizabeth Zanoni provides a cutting-edge comparative look at Italian people and products on the move between 1880 and 1940. Concentrating on foodstuffs—a trade dominated by Italian entrepreneurs in New York and Buenos Aires—Zanoni reveals how consumption of these increasingly global imports affected consumer habits and identities and sparked changing and competing connections between gender, nationality, and ethnicity. Women in particular—by tradition tasked with buying and preparing food—had complex interactions that influenced both global trade and their community economies. Zanoni conveys the complicated and often fraught values and meanings that surrounded food, meals, and shopping. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Migrant Marketplaces offers a new perspective on the linkages between migration and trade that helped define globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Cultures of Italian Migration allows the adjective "Italian" to qualify people's movements along diverse trajectories and temporal dimensions. Discussions on migrations to and from Italy meet in that discursive space where critical concepts like"home," "identity," "subjectivity," and "otherness" eschew stereotyping. This volume demonstrates that interpretations of old migrations are necessary in order to talk about contemporary Italy. New migrations trace new non linear paths in the definitionof a multicultural Italy whose roots are unmistakably present throughout the centuries. Some of these essays concentrate on topics that are historically long-term, such as emigration from Italy to the Americas and southern Pacific Ocean. Others focus on the more contemporary phenomena of immigration to Italy from other parts of the world, including Africa. This collection ultimately offers an invitation to seek out new and different modes of analyzing the migratory act.

Most studies of immigration to the New World have focused on the United States. Samuel L. Baily's eagerly awaited book broadens that perspective through a comparative analysis of Italian immigrants to Buenos Aires and New York City before World War I. It is one of the few works to trace Italians from their villages of origin to different destinations abroad. Baily examines the adjustment of Italians in the two cities, comparing such factors as employment opportunities, skill levels, pace of migration, degree of prejudice, and development of the Italian community. Of the two destinations, Buenos Aires offered Italians more extensive opportunities, and those who elected to move there tended to have the appropriate education or training to succeed. These immigrants, who adjusted more rapidly than their North American counterparts, adopted a long-term strategy of investing savings in their New World home. In New York, in contrast, the immigrants found fewer skilled and white-collar jobs, more competition from previous immigrant groups, greater discrimination, and a less supportive Italian enclave. As a result, rather than put down roots, many sought to earn money as rapidly as possible and send their earnings back to family in Italy. Baily views the migration process as a global phenomenon. Building on his richly documented case studies, the author briefly examines Italian communities in San Francisco, Toronto, and Sao Paulo. He establishes a continuum of immigrant adjustment in urban settings, creating a landmark study in both immigration and comparative history.

Race and Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861-1911 examines the development of Italian southern question discourse based on the perceived cultural, political, and economic divide between north and south. This book describes the resonance of meridionalism and how the familiarity of its language lent itself to other discussions of difference--the racialization of the southern question and its appropriation by criminal anthropologists in constructing biological hierarchies; the comparisons between the conquest of Africa and the internal colonization of the south; and the establishment of a southern Italian diaspora whose unique racial characteristics could lead to a possible new form of imperialism in South America.