In thinking of Mario Mignone: A model for what Italian/American leaders can learn today 1

There are those who will speak to Mario Mignone's writings on Italian studies; specifically, his work on Buzzati and De Filippo as well as other Italian cultural phenomena to which he had dedicated his intellectual pursuits. Going in a somewhat different direction, I wish to speak about Mario Mignone as a professor of Italian who had also decided to dedicate his professional life to Italian/American studies as well.¹ This working across the intellectual aisle is what makes his profile unique, the very few among many professors of Italian. Indeed, a modest number of minted Italian studies professors have dealt with Italian/American studies to any notable degree, fewer than 20 I would submit. ²

Among his writings and activities, I shall mention some of the numerous enterprises that I deem significant, among his many, in this hyphenated trajectory. Considered by Ben Lawton (1993: 156) as a “healthy, sane corrective to all this mind-numbing, politically motivated distortion of history” that followed the 1992 celebrations, Columbus: Meeting of Cultures consists of an incisive introduction by Mario B Mignone, which is then followed by 14 essays. In straightforward, dispassionate language, Mario discusses the various accusations against Columbus and his people, noting along the way, for instance, that slavery was already a “universal institution” practiced by inborn populations of both Africa and the New World (Mignone, 1992: xi). Further still, he tells us, as many as “90 per cent [of the deaths of natives] cannot be attributed to their mass murdering … [but to] the lack of immunity to diseases that the Europeans unknowingly brought with them, smallpox, typhoid fever, mumps, measles, and whooping cough” (Mignone, 1992: xi). ³

In eschewing the notion and practice of presentism, Mario continues to tell us that “if we want to indict Columbus and his immediate successors for having destroyed the natives, their culture and their environment, it has to be done applying the standards of his time” (Mignone, 1992: xii). ⁴ “Presentism, at its worst,” Lynn Hunt (2002)tells us:

encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures.

In this spirit of chronological differentiation, Mario (1992: xii) underscores Columbus's and his contemporaries’ “right to be judged from their own perspective.” ⁵

Timing constitutes the major conundrum today for those who decide to move forward, in either direction, or are engaged in the “Columbus Affair.” In this regard, Columbus: Meeting of Cultures is a collection of smart, scholarly essays that, while not comprising only an overall approbation and celebration of Columbus, does provide the reader with the requisite historical background in order for him/her to arrive at a conclusion of sorts. This was in 1992, when the fan was initially sullied by the protests against the 1992 quincentenary of Columbus's arrival. Against such a heated background, Mario dared to organize a symposium and a subsequent collection of essays that are, in the end, well balanced and accessible to the non-academic reader as well: a model, I would submit, for some today.

In his preface to Columbus: Meeting of Cultures, Eli Siefman, Director of the “Center for Excellence and Innovation in Education,” tells us that the Columbian quincentenary should be neither an unmitigated hagiographic celebration nor a strident denigration of the historical figure (Mignone, 1992: vii). It should be, ideally, an “educational opportunity” (Mignone, 1992: vii) for a further investigation, grounded as best possible in historical fact, of Columbus and his voyages. This was, to be sure, the major intention of the symposium from which Columbus: Meeting of Cultures originated. What was important for Mario then, as should be equally important for us today, is “historical context,” as we read at the very beginning of his introduction:

We wanted to create a forum where new scholarly findings and views could be presented, tested and even debated in a period when too many new views, not grounded in serious scholarship, were being thrown around. Mass-media and [amateur] scholars having a field day stirring up interest in the historical event by raising issues through sound-bite or by engaging in a debate on issues that had everything to do with today and nothing to do with five centuries ago. In effect, they were judging Columbus outside of his historical context. (Mignone, 1992: viii, emphasis mine)

This desire for “serious scholarship” and the eschewing of “[amateur] scholars” and their soundbites constitute any sound manner through which such debatable issues need to be discussed. Further still, we can readily infer the binomial of “town-gown” articulated here in the contrast of “serious scholarship” versus “mass media and [amateur] scholars”: the latter simply need to consult the former.

Along with many important and impactful symposia and conferences over the years, “Columbus: Meeting of Cultures” was held at and sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies, which Mario had founded in 1985 and which has become over the years that “casa,” as Luigi Fontanella (2019: 391) recently called it, which had served and continues to serve the many students, high-school teachers and college professors, and Italian Americans and Italophiles, and not only in the greater New York metropolitan area but, indeed, on a national and international level as well.

Among the many precedents that come to mind as we re-consider Mario's 1992 engagement with Columbus, as both symposium and publication, is the name Leonard Covello. Mario's above-cited words of 30 years ago resonate today for sure. The recent discussions about Columbus, especially those among some of today's Italian/American leaders, leave much to be desired. There are too many soundbites and not enough serious scholarship, to echo Mario. That said, this is where Covello's pedagogical philosophy comes to mind. First, in re-reading Covello's (2013 [1958]) The Heart Is the Teacher, we understand that there is a history of the Italian American community's antipathy during those years of mid-century America toward an American school system that the Italian/American community seemed unable to reconcile with its predominantly Southern ways. We can readily see such antipathy as having transformed itself into contemporary time's seemingly apparent distrust on the part of certain Italian/American leaders in today's scholars engaged in Italian/American diaspora studies—or, as one individual declared on Facebook and in an open speech, “acadeemics.”

A more significant point we can learn from Covello is his insistence on service. “Less noticed, but no less important,” as Gerald Meyer (2013: 214) reminds us, “was Covello's emphasis on service.” And, according to such a notion, the success of the individual student becomes in a sense a pivotal point of a collection of individuals aspiring to the realization of community betterment. A dual goal that sees the neighborhood and the family inseparably connected. This notion underpinned his conception of a community-centered school that “accepts responsibility for the social well-being of the community as well as for the educational training of the students committed to the care of the school” (Covello, 1939: 15).

This aspiration for the realization of community betterment is clearly what lies at the base of Mario's founding of the Center for Italian Studies. Covello wanted to bridge that gap that he conceived between the ethos of the Little Italys and the American school system; a community-centered school had to “deal with the child in connection with his social background and in relation to all forces, disruptive as well as constructive, that contribute to his education” (Covello, 1938: 134). So, too, Mario decided to open the Center for Italian Studies to a plethora of subject matters, some naturally celebratory, others more debatable with difficult resolutions, if any at all. Namely, he placed alongside each other the “disruptive as well as constructive,” those elements that remain today so necessary for any resolution of debatable issues within Italian/American diaspora studies (read, also, Italian studies) dedicated to the intellectual enterprise.

With regard to the Center, I am reminded of a notably varied programming—those during and after Mario's administration of the Center—in the following:

Writing About Islam, Narrating a Diaspora

These and other topics comprised the innumerable symposia and conferences that Mario organized through the Center for Italian Studies, never shying away from the debatable and/or controversial while alternating between Italian and Italian/American / Italian Diaspora studies.

In addition to the above-mentioned symposia, I am also reminded of the many books the Center produced under Mario's leadership. Published under the imprint of the FILibrary, the subject matter is both numerous and varied to boot. Of the dozens of titles published, I remind you of the following:

ItalAfrica: Bridging Continents and Cultures

What becomes apparent is that the books published by the Center often originate from the many symposia it organized. This immortalization of the various presentations of such wide-ranging topics is an important task of academic recordkeeping. It creates an intellectual reservoir, an archive, of scholarly activity that can only help provide an intellectual foundation for future scholars.

Of course, we cannot mention the FILibrary series without recognizing one of Mario's truly major accomplishments and, dare we say, indisputable legacies: his having saved the journal Forum Italicum from what seemed to be an inevitable demise. I still remember today most vividly that the journal was, literally, on the chopping block, but that is a story for another venue. ⁶ What we do know is that Michele Ricciardelli, who had founded the journal back in 1967 at Florida State University, approached Mario in the mid-1980s. Since that time, Mario brought the journal to the highest level at which it could exist. It is not an exaggeration to state that, under Mario's leadership, Forum Italicum has become one of the top few leading journals worldwide dedicated to Italian Studies. A decade ago, in fact, it was deemed a “Fascia A” (Class A) journal according to Italy's ANVUR (Agenzia Nazionale per la Valutazione dell’Università e della Ricerca).

But let us return to the 1992 symposium and subsequent publication on Columbus whose objective was “to create a forum where new scholarly findings and views could be presented, tested and even debated in a period when too many new views, not grounded in serious scholarship, were being thrown around” (Mignone, 1992: viii). Said forum of challenging Covello's notion of the “disruptive” (Mario's “views, not grounded in serious scholarship”) with Covello's notion of the “constructive” (Mario's “new scholarly findings”) is all the more necessary as I write.

As I stated earlier, Covello's notion of bridging the gap between Italian Americans and the American school system can readily be extended today to the world at large and figure equally as relevant, during our time, for those who wish to bring forth a broader Italian/American agenda; clearly in 1985 we can presume this to be the ragion d’essere of the Center for Italian Studies, for connecting Italian and Italian/American studies. Uninformed, self-proclaimed leaders who are convinced of possessing an infallibility of historical knowledge refuse to engage with those who might disagree with them. These “amateur scholars,” as Mario dubbed them, do not realize that by reckoning with “all forces, [both the] disruptive as well as constructive,” they might actually bring forth a much more confirmed and substantiated discourse in the end. This is what Covello can teach us today. Despite one's dubious desire to perform strictly within the tribe, dependent only on romanticized, feel-good narratives, we can indeed rely on the task of, as Mario would later tell us, presenting, testing, and debating new scholarly findings.

Back in 2018, when the city supervisors of San Francisco, CA decided to change Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day, one newly minted Italian/American city supervisor, Catherine Stefani, saw the writing on the wall, and that the moniker “Columbus Day” was not long for being. In the spirit of compromise—or might we say a Covellian act of bridging the gap between the “ethos of the Little Italys” and the system at large—she introduced legislation for an ordinance declaring that the day also be recognized as Italian Heritage Day. ⁷ In a series of comments on Facebook, one then-president of a national organization stated: “We know what Italians did for this country, what have Indigenous people done?” When I first read this, I was astounded by such ignorance. The very adjective “indigenous” should give us pause before articulating such ballyhoo.

As I close, yet another example of anti-intellectual blather recently came across my screen. In an email sent to a few thousand people, many of us were subjected to yet another dose of ballyhoo from an aspirant, wannabe historian of Italian America. The doltish statement is: “[O]ver the last 40 years, with each passing generation, we’ve watched our heritage and our history gradually slip away” (Russo, 2022). No, nothing can be further from the truth. First, neither heritage nor history slip away; they are either forgotten or ignored. Indeed, over the past five decades we have watched many Italian Americans—including many of those who put themselves forth as leaders—abandon their language, their history, and their literature as they moved into WASP America. In so doing, we might assume that they managed to enter this new “bleached and bland” world, as David Riesman (1953: xv) once called it, ⁸ not through their Italian cultural values, many of which have been presented, tested, and debated throughout the 37 years of the Center for Italian Studies; rather, through the WASP recognition of money as power, and not knowledge. ⁹ As they jettisoned their heritage, they also ignored the sociological, historical, and cultural writings that continue, indeed persist, in the face of such neglect. Again, here, too, we can hark back to Covello's desire to bridge the gap, and the Center for Italian Studies' accomplishment of as much through its decades of cultural and intellectual activity. Namely, both the knowledge gap in general and, specifically, the chasm between Italian/American uninformed, romanticized narratives and, to echo Pierre Nora (1989: 8), history, which “is an intellectual and secular production [that] calls for analysis and criticism.” In the end, if one's knowledge of the facts is lacking, and one's rhetoric is illogical, one simply is not in the position to make any semblance of a valid argument. Mario knew as much.