"MINOR MINORITIES" AND MULTICULTURALISM

Note sul testo
This book expands, enriches, and questions current notions of multiculturalism by integrating the study of the literature of two significant European immigrant groups in the United States (the Italians and the Jews) into larger theoretical theorizations of the Other in the American literature university curriculum. It seeks to reintroduce these two literatures, now significantly ignored, into this general literary discussion of alterity and ultimately question how they might figure in the multicultural and World Literature classroom. The comparison of these two immigrant literatures allows us to investigate how the discourse of race contributed to the configuration of ethnic identity, both by dominant White American culture and within these immigrant groups themselves. This volume also seeks to tie the study of these two immigrant literatures to pressing theoretical and pedagogical concerns, namely, the role of American ethnic literature in the multicultural classroom and its place in Comparative Literature and World Literature curricula.

Note sull'Autore
Dorothy M. Figueira is a Distinguished Research Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Translating the Orient (1991), The Exotic: A Decadent Quest (1994), Aryans, Jews, and Brahmins (2002), Otherwise Occupied: Theories and Pedagogies of Alterity (2008), and The Hermeneutics of Suspicion (2015). She is the Honorary President of the International Comparative Literature Association.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments

Introduction

Historical Overwiew
Dorothy M. Figueira, Jewish and Italian Migrant Fictions: Syncretisms and Interchangeabilities Born of a Shared Immigrant Experience

Part I, Italian American Literature
Chapter 1, Marina Camboni, Going Native: Identity and Identification in Carol Maso’s Ghost Dance and Robert Viscusi’s ellis island
Chapter 2, Mary Jo Bona, Adria Bernardi’s Openwork and Italian Women’s Diasporas
Chapter 3, Leonardo Buonomo, Ethnicity, Gender, and Culture in Garibaldi M. Lapolla’s Miss Rollins in Love
Chapter 4, John Wharton Lowe, Humor as Counterpoint and Engine in di Donato and Binelli
Chapter 5, Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh, Salvatore Scibona’s The End: Italian American Literature in Translation between Italy and the US
Chapter 6, Valerio Massimo De Angelis, The Unfortunate Pilgrim: Mario Puzo’s Deconstruction of the American Myths of Migration

Part II, Jewish American Literature
Chapter 7, David M. Schiller, From Ethnic Stereotyping to Geopolitics in the Vaudeville and World War I Era Songs of Irving Berlin and Al Piantadosi
Chapter 8, Doris Kadish, Jewish Immigrants in the 1930s: Politics, Literature, Religion
Chapter 9, Marta Anna Skwara, The Polish Factor in Jewish American Writing. Three Cases: Sholem Asch, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Jerzy Kosiński
Chapter 10, Marjanne E. Goozé, The Holocaust Memoir as American Tale: Ruth Kluger’s Still Alive
Chapter 11, Paolo Simonetti, “Sounds Like Jew Talk to Me”: Assimilation and Alienation in Bernard Malamud’s The People
Chapter 12, Charles Byrd, In Nabokov’s Philosemitic Footsteps: Selected Russian-Jewish American Immigrant Novels of Gary Shteyngart and Irina Reyn

Part III, Canon, Pedagogy, and the Other
Chapter 13, Fred L. Gardaphé, Art of the State: The Politics of Multiculturalism in American Literary Studies; or, Who Hung the Rembrandt on the Multicultural Mural?
Chapter 14, Franca Sinopoli, “Transnationalism” and/or the Canon in Comparative Literary Studies

Part IV, Multiculturalism from Other Perspectives
Chapter 15, Thomas E. Peterson, Weltliteratur and Literary Anthropology: The Case of Italian American Literature
Chapter 16, Ulrike Schneider, Contextualizing Jewish American Literature
Chapter 17, Sabnam Ghosh, Pedagogies of Immigrant Otherness
Chapter 18, Ipshita Chanda, Plural Cultures, Pluralist Ethics and the Practice of Comparative Literature

Conclusion, Ethics of the Other
Chapter 19, S Satish Kumar, Rethinking Collectivities and Intersubjectivities: Inenarrability, Hospitality and Migrancy
Chapter 20, Jenny Webb, Theoretical Fluencies

Contributors

Note
Italia, Americhe e altri mondi
Collana del Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi ItaloAmericani (CISIA) dell’Università di Macerata 1