Abstract
I enter this conversation from an oblique angle, if not quite as a complete outsider. I do not work in the field of Italian Studies. My Italian language skills are so embarrassingly feeble that I strategically avoid professional and social situations where they might be put to the test. (What little Italian I do speak, however, never fails to impress my siblings and cousins, second- and third-generation Italian Americans raised in families where Italian language was suppressed in the service of assimilation—a common story and yet one deserving deeper scholarly inquiry). Even as I have become firmly affiliated with Italian American Studies—I serve on the editorial board of Italian American Review, have published there as well as in Italian Americana and Voices in Italian Americana, have served two terms on the Italian American Studies Association's (IASA) Executive Council, and regularly attend the organization's annual conference—this was not my field of training and I continue to play catch-up with its history and its canonical texts. My coursework as a graduate student in American Studies, with a primary interest in jazz and African American culture, was bereft of anything related to Italian America or the larger Italian diaspora. If there was any possibility of independent study in this area, I would not have known—I simply had no scholarly interest. I literally did not know of the existence of Italian American studies until seven years after I finished my PhD.
Despite these stunning disqualifications—or, actually, because of them—I embrace this invitation to reflect on the transnational turn in Italian Studies with an inkling that I might have something useful to say. That I have been afforded this opportunity notwithstanding my tenuous relationship to the field may itself serve as evidence of at least one direction Transnational Italian Studies has taken and help us to see where it may be going. Academic fields and disciplines are inherently relational; they develop at each other's edges, redrawing each other's boundaries, conceiving new methods of shared inquiry, producing new forms and bodies of knowledge in their overlapping spaces. What we call the humanities is a web of just such relationality: history, music, art, national literatures, religion, and other established disciplines are forever bleeding into each other while also absorbing (with varying levels of willingness and resistance) the influence of upstart inter-disciplines such as comparative literature, cultural studies, critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, and the like. As someone whose career has dwelled in the margins of both entrenched disciplines and emergent inter-disciplines, I have no small stake in arguing for the significance of methodologies and knowledge production that emerge out of interstitial spaces.
If I was a stranger to Italian and Italian American Studies in my formative years, my subsequent scholarly projects have found me inching closer to those fields—not so much because I went looking for them, but because they reached out and found me. My most recent book, Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge (Gennari, 2017), is, as its title suggests, firmly centered in US ethnic/race studies. The book probes black/Italian cultural intersections in music and vernacular soundscapes, foodways, sports, and other forms of expressive culture within the context of a complicated US social history of competition, collaboration, intimacy, mutual emulation, suspicion, conflict, and distancing. Its conceptual framework and modes of analysis come straight out of American Studies 101. For the most part, the book's transnational dimension is limited, even perfunctory. Yet, perhaps tellingly, it culminates in a paean to an Italian-educated Eritrean man who migrated to the USA, became a successful restaurateur and painter, and, with his African American wife, lived a life steeped in what I describe as “an intensely connective Africanity seasoned with the soulful flavors of African American and Mediterranean sociality” (Gennari, 2017: 238). I suggest that this man—the late Ficre Ghebreyesus—embodied, in his cooking, his visual art, his musicality, and his overall habitus, the kind of transnational, multicultural, multidimensional subjectivity that productively complicates and enriches our understanding of what we mean by “Italian” and “black,” while pointing us toward a US future marked by new patterns of immigration, mobility, cultural practice, and imagination.
As it happens, Flavor and Soul has received disappointingly meager attention in American Studies circles. Such interest as the book has generated has come primarily from Italian Studies. Given how fraught and consequential issues of race and racism loom in contemporary Italy—the recent election of a neofascist female prime minister; a persistently divisive politics of immigration, citizenship, and civil rights; rancorous debates over the aesthetic and cultural traits of putatively authentic Italianness; subnational identities transposed into notions of a “white Italy” and a “black Italy,” etc.—perhaps I should not be surprised that the book would capture the interest of a certain cohort of Italian Studies scholars. I am hopeful that work like mine, and of others working more explicitly and robustly in comparative and transnational frameworks, can help Italian Studies and American Studies (not just Italian American Studies) grow more intimately connected and, indeed, mutually constitutive.
Later I will spotlight jazz as one prominent example of an area ripe for such attention with a special focus on the transatlantic dynamics of race and modernity. But we must remember that the consanguinity of Italy and America is nothing less than historically foundational, originating in European myths of a New World that putatively had to be discovered and colonized, and of history itself as cohering into pre- and post-Columbian epochs. Myths and symbols essential to nationalist sentiment and ideology often originate in transnational contexts, as do cultural and political practices and institutions. This is powerfully demonstrated for the Italian/American case—to take one example—in groundbreaking recent work by Giorgio Bertellini. In Italy in American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and The Picturesque, Bertellini (2010) shows how traditions of landscape painting that produced widely circulated images of an aestheticized mezzogiorno and a romanticized Mediterranean Europe furnished a racialized visual template for early 20th-century American filmmakers. In The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America, Bertellini (2019) delineates how the US government, the Hollywood studios, and the new field of public relations jointly shaped the intertwined images of Rudolf Valentino and Benito Mussolini, turning them into paragons of charismatic masculinity in a seminal convergence of popular celebrity and political authority.
Such work is as significant for its cross-disciplinary methodology, one that deftly weaves together art history, film and media studies, race and gender studies, and business and political history, as for its alluring, multilevel portrait of transnational aesthetic and cultural processes. But if we are to better understand the convergence of global and local forces in the Italian diaspora, we still also need the kind of nuts-and-bolts work grounded in shipping manifests, newspapers, court rulings, census data, and birth, death, tax, school, and marriage records. Only then will we be able to fully reckon, for instance, with the deep entanglement of Italy and the USA in each other's late 19th-century nation-building projects. It is no coincidence that the Italian Risorgimento and US Reconstruction happened at the same time. The civil wars fought in Italy and the USA in the 1860s brought economic calamity to the southern regions of both countries; the still-consolidating Italian state disenfranchised and effectively dispossessed the mezzogiorno peasantry, leading to the large-scale emigration of Sicilians and southern Italians. In the Gulf Coast US South, many of these migrants found work on plantations, in lumber yards, and in other sectors of the regional economy, replacing emancipated African Americans. In New Orleans, Italian migrants and their descendants boosted local economic growth by establishing control of the fruit-importing trade and bolstering the construction, hospitality, and entertainment industries.
As Jessica Barbata Jackson (2020) persuasively argues in Dixie's Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South, this epochal transatlantic migration was interwoven into the fabric of the US white/black color line, both its de jure codification and its de facto instability and confusion. Central to the instability of the Jim Crow system was the fluidity of Italian racial identity. Jackson contends that turn-of-the century Sicilians in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are best characterized not as racially ambiguous, or as in-between black and white, or as “white on arrival”—the prevailing theories—but rather as “racially transient.” These immigrants and their offspring identified in certain places and times as “white southerners” and in others as “people of color.” Gulf South Italians were lynched in the name of white supremacy at the same time as they were perceived to possess “unconquerable white blood” (Jackson, 2020: 45). They sometimes could obtain a marriage license to wed a black partner; at other times they were charged with miscegenation.
This concept of racial transience—one I find incisive and potent not just in the Gulf South context but also as a tool for unpacking how mobility itself brings about particularized racial codes and regimes in different regional and national contexts—worked alongside a similarly fluid and metamorphic situation regarding (trans)national identity. While showing how Italy's national unification efforts were directly linked to the large-scale emigration of Sicilians and southern Italians, Dixie's Italians also explains how political, legal, and diplomatic events, such as demands made by the Italian consulate in New Orleans for indemnity payments after the lynching of Italians, helped create a shared sense of italianità among Gulf Coast Sicilians and immigrants hailing from various peninsular regions. As Robert Viscusi memorably quipped, for Sicilians, Neapolitans, Calabrians, and Puglians to become Italian, first they had to become American. 1
Just when and where and how they became white, and to what effect, remains a matter of no small consequence for the history of US nationalism. But a wider-angled transnational, transhistorical lens sharpens our view of racialization as the precondition for, and deep structural foundation of, nothing less than Western capitalism and modernity. A hugely important recent collection, The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Black Mediterranean Collective, 2021), builds on Paul Gilroy's seminal paradigm of the Black Atlantic by drawing attention to the oft-repressed role of Italy at the outset of the Atlantic slave trade. What historian David Brion Davis called the “strong sequential links” between the transatlantic slave system and the Italian Renaissance—involving, for example, African slaves in the cultivation and production of sugar in late medieval Sicily—anchored the ontological formation of a Western humanism predicated on the myth of black inhumanity (Davis, 2000: 459; cited in Black Mediterranean Collective, 2021: 3).
As an example of a related but distinctive argument about the transhistorical construction of antipodal whiteness and blackness through pre-national, national, and transnational Italy, I would like briefly to spotlight the work of Francesca Bellei, a freshly-minted PhD scholar whose dissertation, titled Imagined mothers: The role of Italy and ancient Greece in the construction of Anglo-American hegemony, was completed in spring 2022 in Harvard University's Department of Comparative Literature (Bellei, 2022).
Bellei's project investigates three matters salient to the present discussion: the discursive figuration of Italy as a mother, and of the Mediterranean as both the putative matrix of “civilization” and as a liminal space between Europe and Africa; the intertwining of Italian migration to the Americas and Italian colonialism in Africa; and the shifting formations of Italian and Italian American raciality. This dissertation is frankly an astonishing feat of intellectual imagination, grounded in deep transhistorical knowledge, and realized through an adroit application of psychoanalytic, postcolonial, queer, and critical race theory to a sweeping literary genealogy running from Euripedes and Aristedes through Petrarch, Dante, Byron, Forster, James, Di Donato, and Puzo, among others. The focus moves from ancient Greece and Rome to the eras of British imperialism and the Italian Risorgimento on through to Italian colonial wars in Africa and mass emigration to the Americas. A culminating bravura riff on The Sopranos deftly pulls all these threads into an elegant weave.
Bellei's anchoring argument is that Anglo-American cultural hegemony relies on an appropriative pattern in which ancient Greece serves as a mothering and nursing figure for imperial Rome, with Italy later serving the same function for imperial Britain. The masculinization of Rome and later Britain (and finally the US) is predicated on the feminization of Greece and later Italy, a process that simultaneously disempowers those nations and invests them with huge importance as symbols of bygone glories and a primordial past-ness that enables the forward-pointing teleology of the imperial nations. Far from exalting Italy's putatively foundational role in the emergence of European humanism and its concomitant claims to universalism, Bellei's argument is meant to explain how the phenomenon of an imagined kinship, centered on a mythic motherhood, generates a European discourse of self/other, a tool of exclusion and abjection hinging on both gendered and racialized constructions of nation and national character. In a crucial pivot point, Bellei first shows how the Italy-as-mother discourse was engineered by northern Italian intellectual and political elites to foment national unity in the post-Risorgimento period, and then how Italy's internal subaltern subjects, mostly agricultural laborers from Sardinia, Sicily, and the South, absorbed and propagated the rhetoric of Italian maternalism both as transatlantic migrants and as African colonizers.
The implications of this formulation are richly generative, building toward new understandings of Italy and the Mediterranean in histories and discourses of race and power. It provides a framework for analyzing Italy, the Mediterranean, and Europe as imaginative geographies fundamentally structuring the global north/south configuration in which we now live. Most importantly, by compelling us to think more deeply about “The Mediterranean,” “Italy,” “Europe,” “America,” “The West,” and so on as constructs, discursive formations, and affective objects, Bellei implicitly asks us to scrutinize more carefully the very concepts of nation and nationhood—not least because her project moves chronologically all the way from the pre-national (e.g. Greek city-states) to the re-national (my shot at a term to connote what happens when states like, say, the USA, Argentina, and Australia absorb significant numbers of immigrants who, over time, force change in their adopted country's definition of nationhood—literally, what it means to be American, Argentinean, Australian).
Such scrutiny is a necessary precondition for thinking clearly about anything we might call “transnational.” That is, any coherent notion of the transnational is axiomatically related to some readily intelligible notion of the national. (A related proposition: any investment in the transnational accrues to the benefit of the national—transiting across some entity, or between two or more entities, confirms and strengthens the salience of those entities.) Here I mean to echo what I said earlier about academic disciplines, in this case to make the point that nations, too, are inherently relational: they are continually in a process of mutually defining themselves and each other through opposition, collaboration, competition, alliance, and other modes of encounter. This relationality is as much about culture as it is about military, diplomatic, and economic matters.
The field of American Studies, for example, originated in the late 1930s but blossomed institutionally in the post-Second World War period as the USA assumed global political and military leadership and aimed to delineate the features of a unified, consensual, distinctive American culture through study of the nation's history, literature, arts, technology, and social life. The field operated in the context of the Cold War and benefited materially from it. Fulbright-supported American Studies literature professors, State Department-sponsored jazz musicians, and Seven Sister college coeds on study-abroad programs were key if often unwitting participants in soft-power initiatives to promote American culture as a bulwark against Communist insurgencies in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. In the wake of the Sputnik missile launch, American Studies graduate students were supported by US Department of Defense grants intended to counter not just Russian warfare capabilities but also Soviet cultural prowess and ideological dexterity.
Cold War strategic policy dictated that the USA cultivate amicable relations with African anticolonial movements, even as the US government could not figure out how to position itself in relation to the civil rights and black freedom movements at home. At the same time, huge amounts of American economic aid underwrote the reconstruction of war-ravaged Italy, with the two nations’ education and culture industries becoming intertwined through burgeoning art history programs, the cultural cachet of the American Academy in Rome and Peggy Guggenheim's Venetian ventures, tightly affiliated music styles and ecosystems (opera, jazz, Neapolitan song, the ascendancy of Frank Sinatra, Mario Lanza, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Vic Damone, Joni James, Rosemary Clooney, et al.), and a cosmopolitan film culture connecting Rome and Hollywood (e.g. Roman Holiday, Federico Fellini, Sophia Loren, spaghetti westerns).
Where previous scholars have set the beginning of the US State Department's use of jazz as a foreign policy tool in the 1950s, with the Eisenhower administration's jazz tours in the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe, recently the musicologist Anna Harwell Celenza has shown that the first use of the approach came in Italy soon after the armistice, with the targeted circulation of jazz V-Discs, radio programming, and concert presentations that came outfitted with promotional rhetoric about jazz as an American art form embodying democracy and freedom. Armed with this ideological cudgel, US cultural cold warriors angled to disaffiliate jazz from both fascism and communism (Celenza, 2019). This was no simple matter, as is made clear in Celenza's (2017) book Jazz Italian Style: From Its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra, which shows that jazz was a central part of Mussolini's fascist cultural program; that virtually all successful Italian jazz musicians from the early 1930s to the mid-1940s depended on the support of the fascist state for their livelihoods; and that many of these musicians concealed and/or willfully misrepresented this fact for years afterwards (Celenza, 2017).
Jazz Italian Style to my knowledge is the first English-language book to conduct a serious, deeply researched examination of the transatlantic connections between Italian and Italian American jazz. As such, Celenza's book is part of a burgeoning movement in academic jazz studies to expand the field beyond its long-standing geographic focus on the USA. Whether called jazz transnationalism, jazz diaspora, diasporic jazz, global jazz, jazz internationalism, or something similar, this move to examine jazz music and its discourses across national borders is the latest development in what has been known since the 1990s as the New Jazz Studies. This development is multifoliate: one branch features studies of national jazz scenes, pointedly including locations outside of the well-examined Western Europe/Scandinavia/South Africa/Japan/Brazil axis; another focuses on a wider framing and deeper study of the African diaspora; yet another aims to theorize jazz culture as, in its essence, a product as well as a producer of migration, mobility, and border crossing.
Australian jazz scholar Bruce Johnson (2020: 3) provocatively argues that “jazz was not ‘invented’ and then exported; it was invented in the process of being disseminated.” Johnson sets out to explicitly challenge the entrenched jazz narrative—ascendent, even hegemonic, often sacralized, and not just in the USA—positing New Orleans as the music's place of origin, African Americans as its key progenitors, and a canon of recordings by US (mostly African American) masters as the essential and unassailable textual record of the music's history and stylistic evolution. Johnson asks penetrating questions about the objects and methods of jazz studies, questions we might ask analogously about Italian Studies: Should we define Italy and its culture as originating in and primordially related to a geographically enclosed place (or set of places), and if so, how should we conceptualize and study the relationship between this geo-cultural core and its peripheries? Alternatively, should we resist the center/margins model of cultural diffusion owing to its imperialist overtones, and, while at it, eschew even the diaspora model for its implication of a straightforward genesis narrative plotted as a one-way cultural flow from single points in time and space? If Italy is not constituted by place, or is not just constituted by place, just what is Italy and how do we best apprehend and analyze it? If a particular canon of texts and artifacts (literary, musical, visual, gastronomic, folkloric, historiographic) does not constitute or adequately represent Italian culture, is that down to the inadequacy of that specific canon, or rather to the inherent problem of canonicity itself? Would we go so far as to argue, in parallel with Johnson's assertion about jazz, that Italy was invented, and only exists, through the process of its dissemination—in other words, that Italy is its global, transnational circulation of people, goods, ideas, representations, and discourses?
A small but hearty serving of cultural history should suffice to suggest how we might think of jazz and Italy as not just intersecting but as importantly co-constitutive entities operating within the frame of transatlantic modernism. Celenza (2017: 23–24) observes that whereas in France and Germany in the late 1910s and early 1920s jazz was seen as an “exotic, avant-garde art form performed almost exclusively by African Americans and rooted in a primitivist aesthetic,” in Italy “listeners perceived jazz as a fully commercialized art form linked to wealth, modern technology, and Italian American innovation.” A cadre of influential Italian artists and intellectuals, starting with the Futurists, embraced jazz as a “native” art form—that is, an art that was Italian in spirit and marked from its emergence by Italian innovation, in particular the important role played by Italian (mostly Sicilian) musicians in New Orleans in jazz's pre- and early periods—thereby setting the stage for Benito Mussolini's appropriation of the music as part of his fascist cultural program. Jazz, Futurism, and Italian fascism converged in a nexus of discourses emphasizing speed, vigor, courage, youth, energy, urbanism, machinery, and noise. Italy, the Futurist poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti said, should be recognized as a modern nation and “not merely as a land of ruins and museum.” Jazz, a new music for a modernizing nation, fit the bill perfectly (Celenza, 2017: 23–24).
One of the defining characteristics of the interwar European avant-garde was a fascination with the seemingly oppositional realms of primitivism and machine-age modernity. This preoccupation was not exclusive to jazz, but it is striking how perfectly jazz fit the model of what Jeremy Lane (2013: 3) calls the “techno-primitive hybrid.” In an aesthetic response to the shocks of war, imperialism, and industrial mechanization, modernist artists across media nurtured a potent fantasy of primordial Africa married to futuristic America. French poet Jean Cocteau, in a series of essays in 1918 and 1919, proposed a network of associations between what he saw as jazz's primeval rhythms and the formal purity of skyscrapers, ocean liners, and other icons of the American machine age (Lane, 2013: 4).
Italian Futurists like Marinetti and the painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni joined the French primitivists in embracing jazz's rhythmic and sonic properties, as well as its association with American modern urbanism, as a source of rejuvenation for a tired, complacent, and backward-looking European bourgeois society. Enthusiasm for jazz spread very quickly beyond artistic avant-garde circles to Italy's affluent elites; the music anchored a burgeoning nightclub scene in Rome and all the major northern cities. New dance schools teaching steps keyed to jazz tunes “sprouted like weeds across the urban landscape,” Celenza (2017: 48) writes, “promising step-by-step upward mobility for eager, aspiring socialites.”
Much of this enthusiasm hinged on a misperception of jazz's origins owing to a brief flash of success enjoyed by Sicilian American trumpeter Nick LaRocca and his group of fellow New Orleans white musicians, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB). In 1917, the ODJB cut what most jazz scholars credit as the first jazz phonograph record, a 78-rpm shellac disc produced by the Victor Talking Machine Company, with “Dixie Jazz Band One-Step” on the A side and “Livery Stable Blues” on the B side. Despite this milestone achievement, the ODJB's reputation as jazz anti-heroes—a distraction from more important musicians and “real” jazz history—continues to endure (Leo, 2018: 39–44). Many have derided the ODJB as a reactionary minstrelsy outfit that capitalized on the racial bias of the nascent recording industry to eclipse the groundbreaking jazz played by superior black musicians—a position LaRocca did little to discourage when, from the mid-1930s until his death in 1961, he petulantly disparaged African Americans and insisted that jazz was an entirely white invention. Touring Europe in 1919 and 1920 behind their breakthrough recording, the ODJB heralded itself in publicity materials as the “Creators of Jazz.” Italian reprints of ODJB records and the gramophones they were played on were adduced as evidence of Italian technological modernity and linked in fascist propaganda to Guglielmo Marconi's invention of the radio. Pride in LaRocca's heritage encouraged some Italian critics and promoters to inflate his artistic image, casting the trumpeter/cornetist as a pioneering jazz composer—despite a highly publicized legal case that denied LaRocca's claim to authorship of “Livery Stable Blues,” a judge in Chicago ruling that the tune was “an old negro melody … that has been known for a great many years” (Leo, 2020: 320).
African American musicians did not travel to Italy regularly until the late 1920s, and, as Celenza (2017: 86) notes, “there was no ‘Harlem’ in Rome or Milan, as there was in Paris's Montmartre district.” When African American jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet began to arrive, their highly publicized presence, coupled with the growing international influence of French primitivism under the banner of the Negritude movement, led to an acceptance of the idea that authentic jazz was rooted in black vernacular culture. This was reinforced by Hollywood films which, in part because of Mussolini's love of American cinema, became extremely popular in Italy. “Film brought a face to jazz,” Celenza (2017: 100) avers, “and in many American films, this face was black.” Such imagery helped cement in the minds of many Italians the idea that jazz was African American in origin and essence, notwithstanding LaRocca (and other Sicilian American musicians like ODJB drummer Tony Sbarbaro and the celebrated clarinetist Leon Roppolo). Nevertheless, King of Jazz, the 1930 Hollywood feature film based on white Colorado-born bandleader Paul Whiteman's autobiography hyping his mission to “make a lady out of jazz” (read: to domesticate and legitimize jazz by rescuing it from its affiliation with lower-class black and white men and the New Woman of the period who demanded sexual and social liberties), drew record crowds when it was released in Italy. Italian audiences were thrilled that the film included performances by Italian American musicians, notably the pioneering jazz violinist Giuseppi “Joe” Venuti and his collaborator, the guitar virtuoso Eddie Lang (Salvatore Massaro).
As in France and Britain, by the early 1930s Italian jazz discourse had become increasingly focused on ostensible racial differences and came with a full repertoire of stereotypes about black instinct, irrationality, orality, and carnality, on the one hand, and white reason, intellect, textuality, and refinement, on the other. Anti-jazz screeds came from both left and right. Antonio Gramsci, in a Marxist formulation now more commonly associated with Theodor Adorno's notoriously paranoid critique of jazz, fretted in his prison notebooks that “it is inconceivable that the repetition of the Negro's physical gestures as they dance around their fetishes and the constant sound of the syncopated rhythm of jazz bands should have no ideological effect” (Celenza, 2017: 88). Italian fascists who earlier had embraced jazz as a potential cornerstone of Italian national culture reconsidered the idea when the music became increasingly associated with French culture, or with an American culture now figured as annoyingly imperialist. “It is stupid, it is ridiculous, it is anti-Fascist,” one commentator grumbled: to go into raptures over the belly dances of a mulatto woman [an apparent reference to Josephine Baker at the Revue Negre] or to run like fools after every American fad that comes over to us from across the ocean. (89)
Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 not only complicated Italy's relationship with the USA and the broader international community but also intensified jazz's transatlantic racial politics. The military and colonial adventure led fascist officials to call for a clearer demarcation between “uncivilized” Africans and “civilized” Italians, leading to an effort to produce a distinctive idiom of Italian jazz shorn of legible black influences. The Futurists had already been pulling back from assertions made in the early 1920s about the importance of black culture to the modernist avant-garde. In his 1929 book Jazz-Band, Anton Giulio Bragalia, a Futurist writer and nightclub owner in Rome, drew a firm distinction between “Negro jazz” and native Italian dance music, seething about “animalistic dances” of “colored people” driven by the “epileptic chaos” of jazz syncopation. The Italian composer Alfredo Casella, a staunch champion of jazz, responded by insisting that “jazz has contributed greatly to bringing rhythm back into European music.” But the jazz he was keenest to defend and promote was the symphonic style associated with white figures like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Paul Whiteman (94–99).
Italy's effort to colonize East Africa was supported by many pro-Mussolini Italian Americans and roundly condemned by most African Americans, putting the two communities at loggerheads, and unleashing a wave of anti-Italian sentiment across much of the USA. This happened to coincide exactly with the beginning of jazz's Swing Era, when Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Chick Webb, Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw became not just jazz stars but also Hollywood celebrities. A burgeoning youth culture of swing record hounds and jitterbug dancers received massive publicity in the mainstream media and specialized jazz magazines like Down Beat and Metronome. An alliance between jazz and leftist politics that had started in the early 1930s intensified with the Popular Front initiatives of the Communist Party after 1935 (Gennari, 2006: 34–53).
It was in this fevered context—with its convergence of anti-Italian sentiment, strained relations between African Americans and Italian Americans, and the burgeoning alliance between jazz, youth culture, and the political left—that Nick LaRocca re-emerged into public view with an unsuccessful effort to revive the ODJB. (The band had disbanded in 1925 after one member died, others scattered, and LaRocca, after suffering a nervous breakdown, returned to New Orleans to resume his earlier career in the construction trades.) And it was at this juncture that LaRocca commenced a series of vitriolic op-ed articles, interviews, and letters in which he disparaged African American musicians while floating conspiracy theories about Jewish- and Communist-controlled jazz writers denying a white-identified Sicilian man his rightful place as the creator of jazz.
I have funneled this discussion of jazz, Italy, and transnationalism into a closing focus on Nick LaRocca and the ODJB for a reason. In typical narrations of Italian American jazz, the story begins with the ODJB's Victor recording and turns quickly—this is especially likely if delivered by an Italian or Italian American commentator—to a defensive disclaimer about LaRocca's racism, characterizing it as an unfortunate exception to jazz's ostensible colorblindness, or cross-racial social sympathy, or a specific cultural affinity unique to African Americans and Italian Americans. It goes without saying that there is a problem with a story of black/Italian affinity and cooperation that does not consider how Italian American jazz musicians benefitted from their privileged position in a racist music industry even if they were admirably anti-racist in their personal relations with African Americans. But the point to be made here is that if LaRocca and the ODJB are important to jazz history and Italian American history, it is not just because they happened to make the first commercial jazz phonograph record, nor because LaRocca was an ignominious figure; it is because the story is best understood in the context of a set of issues hovering at the intersection of Italian immigration, colonialism, racialization, modernism, and fascism.
This is the kind of depth and added value we can realize through the turn to a transnational framework. There are also limitations, challenges, and—surely—deficits inherent in this approach. With jazz and other aesthetic forms, the business of ethnic, racial, and national classification is never less than tricky and is often highly fraught, with words like “essentialism” and “authenticity” weaponized and flung around with accusatory glee. One distinct advantage of a transnational paradigm is to escape the parochialism of ethnic/racial nationalism: what codes as righteously Italian in Brooklyn may or may not play that way in Biloxi, Bologna, or Buenos Aires. Still, there is always the danger of lapsing into a kind of (if you will) parochial cosmopolitanism, a tendency to valorize or even merely recognize only those parts of the culture that enjoy wide circulation across national borders, often primarily among elites. There is also the danger of imposing an overly facile, wish-fulfilling transnational connective tissue that confounds local understandings. Celenza's book, for example, is least convincing when it resorts to positing a transatlantic Italian consciousness that allegedly found expression in jazz, and when her claim that Frank Sinatra was influenced by the vocal techniques of Italian musica leggera hinges on the rickety suppositions that Sinatra's mother “was well aware of Italian jazz” and “likely would have been especially drawn to the performances of Natalino Otto” (Celenza, 2017: 188).
What makes Celenza's study groundbreaking and likely to enjoy a long shelf life is, above all, her deep and painstaking research in Italian archival sources, where she was able to track radio programming, cabaret laws, and various institutional networks that formed fascist Italy's national entertainment ecosystem. Her achievement serves as a model for what is possible when a scholar possesses the language skills and broad cultural literacy needed to locate, probe, distill, contextualize, and interpret rich data sets in a framework that exceeds geo-cultural national boundaries. But it also raises important questions about archives and knowledge production in the national, multinational, international, and transnational contexts. (I use the term archives here in the broadest possible sense to connote not just official government and corporate records, library, historical and literary society collections, and the like, but also, say, a private art or music or recipe collection, or really any tangible record of past lived experience.) Why certain archives exist, while others do not; why archives are located where they are; why they are organized in a certain way; how their different material forms (documentary, visual, sonic, digital, tactile, etc.) enable or disable access and require different modes of encounter and analysis—such methodological questions ramify and accrue complexity the more expansive the physical, cultural, and imaginative geography entailed in one's research model.
Italian Studies and American Studies originated at different times in response to a different set of material and political circumstances. But each centered their initial stage of development on the construction of a particular archive, a literary canon purportedly illustrative of some combination of surpassing aesthetic achievement and cultural representativeness—evidence, it was assumed, of a national “mind” in either or both its aspirational and its actual registers. Both fields fabricated geographic national boundaries (the Italian peninsula; the “lower 48” states) and privileged certain locations within those boundaries that held outsized significance in core national myths (Rome and Florence; New England and the western frontier). Both cultivated what Donald Pease (1990: 2) calls a “disciplinary unconscious and field imaginary” premised on the idea that each national culture is exceptional (Italy as the womb of the Renaissance; America as the “City on a Hill”) and that there exists a broad consensus about its fundamental values. In their evolution, both have seized multiple possibilities implied in the word “studies,” enlarging the definition of what counts as art and culture (if not entirely de-centering literature), and borrowing or co-developing with fellow scholars in adjacent humanities fields new theories of culture and methods of cultural analysis. In their own ways and on their own schedules, both have moved away from consensus—by foregrounding differences of race, class, sex, sexuality, ideology, and so on; by uplifting and centering long-silenced voices; and by positing histories of struggle, tension, and disagreement as integral, defining features of the nation.
To reinvigorate any discourse, any field of study, requires moving outside of the established boundaries—not just to walk on the outside, not just to take a different perspective, but to see more clearly how inside and outside function in relation to each other; to try to understand how these spaces and the boundaries between them were established and have been maintained; and to set about reconfiguring those spaces and boundaries. Bruce Johnson says that the point of his study of the jazz diaspora “is to get outside the closed room of the established jazz narrative, enclosed by such boundaries as blackness, masculinity, canonical aesthetics and textuality” (Johnson, 2020: 8). Heretical as it may seem to pursue a framing of jazz outside of the category of blackness, Johnson's move may help us think about the relationship between jazz and blackness more carefully and deeply. Precisely because I am invested in the idea of jazz's blackness (its cultural and aesthetic blackness, I mean, which is not to say that only black people can play it or understand it), it helps me a great deal to ponder (if not to be comfortable with) Johnson's argument that “especially in the 1920s, jazz was to a significant degree the invention of diasporic discourses and practices of non-African-Americans” (Johnson, 2020: 16).
What are the closed rooms, the inside and the outside, the still-to-be-mapped spaces of the Italy we wish to know and to dream? What part of that Italy is the creation of non-Italians and yet-to-be Italians? Who are the strangers in the village, the stranieri nel villagio, who embody that Italy? Are they Ethiopian, Somali, and Libyan immigrants, or are they the descendants of emigrants to Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Canada? Are they young guidos and guidettes cavorting on the Jersey Shore? Do they say capicola or gabagool? Are they faithful dues-paying members of their regional Dante Alighieri Society or are they more invested in finding out actor Dante Basco's ethnicity? If the Italy we wish to recover or to create is centered not on any one canon of art, literature, and music, where should it be centered? If the term Italian diaspora implies a one-way flow of cultural traffic from center to margins, and for that reason reinforces the very politics we are trying to interrogate, would we do better with a term like “polyspora” (Johnson, 2020: 17)? How would that change the way we think about (and name) our courses and our departments?
We know that Italy—like jazz—is a global entity that cannot be contained by the simple idea of a geographically enclosed nation. The transnational turn has opened a door out of that closed room. We have just begun to see the capacious space that lies beyond.