Integrating Italian American Literature into the Multiethnic Syllabus

Abstract

In this article, the authors examine the dynamics generated from the inclusion of Italian American texts in college writing and literature courses that are not specifically focused on Italian American literature. This exploration contains three distinct perspectives and styles from literary artists and teachers who work with students in both traditional undergraduate university settings as well as adult learning settings in three states: New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Olivia Kate Cerrone, Kathy Curto, and Julia Lisella presented a version of this conversation during the roundtable discussion entitled “Teaching Italian American Authors in the Multi-Ethnic Literature Course” at the 53rd Annual Italian American Studies Association Conference held in November 2021. The theme of the conference was Diversity in Italian American Studies: The Status of Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation in Uncertain Times. The focus of this contribution is to offer readers practical strategies for including Italian American texts in their classes, as well as observations on the ways in which these texts affected the classroom dynamics and students’ writing and reflection on their own identities and experiences. The essay also suggests specific texts that can evoke discussions and writings that enable students to reach their learning objectives. The variety of courses taught and student populations served will give readers a deeper sense of how to apply these inclusions into their own syllabi. Common to the learning objectives of all the courses described in this essay is that students evaluate the impact of this literature on their understandings of their own identities as global citizens.

Introduction

As educators with a wide range of teaching experience both inside the traditional academic classroom and nontraditional environments devoted to adult learning, our inclusion of Italian American authors in the various literature and creative writing courses we teach has become an intentional and effective component of a pedagogical strategy designed to foster more inclusive student-led conversations and inquiry as well as discussions that invite personal reflections on a range of complex topics.

Despite the variety of courses we all teach, we learned that our initial conclusions about including Italian American voices in courses that promote the reading of a wide range of ethnic voices yielded lively class discussions and enabled students to make connections and comparisons over a broad range of literature. Each of our presentations considers the following questions:

1. How and to what extent has the inclusion of Italian American voices enabled us to expand our in-class discussions and challenge our students?

2. In what ways is the inclusion of these texts more challenging in our courses because these courses are not specifically focused on Italian studies?

3. How does the inclusion of these texts enable us to meet our particular literary- and writing-course learning objectives?

4. How does reading Italian American literature alongside writers of other backgrounds cultivate discussions on issues of family trauma, gender, queer identity, class and privilege, labor, radicalism, body image, race, and disability?

5. How does the inclusion of these texts enable us to create a safer and more inclusive learning environment that invites vulnerability and self-reflection?

Our post-presentation discussions raised relevant critical questions about how integrating Italian American literature influences our teaching process, style, and pedagogy. Akin in some ways to “collaborative inquiry,” which seeks to equip educators with more tools and ideas through the honest and open sharing of teaching methods, our conversations, too, sought to identify and articulate more clearly why these texts seemed to work so well in our classrooms. Rather than asking how we might enliven our classroom discussions as might be the case with collaborative inquiry, we were instead tracing our rationales and connecting them to our own early training as scholars and writers. Olivia Kate Cerrone, a fiction writer and teacher of both literature and writing, discussed the paucity of writing models of Italian descent offered in her undergraduate programs. Julia Lisella, both a poet and a scholar, had been steeped in Italian American studies since graduate school, though this focus was self-directed, learned independent of any graduate school seminar. Kathy Curto, a memoirist and writing teacher, had been instinctively including Italian American voices in her writing classes out of a deep commitment to teaching a diversity of voices. In some ways, we bring Italian American voices into our classrooms as a pedagogical corrective to the lack of models we were offered as undergraduates.

We discussed being drawn to the inclusion of Italian American voices for our students, not because we relate to them in an ethnically essentialist way (though we all had to admit that may indeed play a role in our initial attraction to some of the texts we teach) but because these texts often courageously approach the questions of immigration, trauma, family dynamics, and other issues we hope to cover in our courses.

Most surprising of all, though, was how our discussions also crystallized our ideas about how we present this material as instructors of Italian descent. How did we learn about other Italian American writers ourselves as undergraduates? What stages of discovery did we ourselves have to make as students to learn that we inherited a literary tradition that was ours to write from and to teach from? What of that discovery of a rich literary tradition do we want to pass on to our students?

Though we discovered much overlap in our syllabi choices, our styles and strategies in responding to some of the central questions vary. Our intent here is to offer a range of ideas and approaches to create stimulating syllabi for the multiethnic classroom. We hope this discussion delivers on our objective and desire: for teachers, students, and readers to develop a deeper understanding of how and why braiding Italian American literature into classrooms can ignite fresh, unexpected discussions about identity, trauma, healing, and belonging.

In part I, we explore how our teaching has been shaped by our training and how it connects to our subject position as faculty of Italian American descent. In part II, we discuss our various courses and the methods and approaches we use when teaching Italian American literature, particularly within the context of other ethnically defined literature, and the effect of that inclusion on some of the other materials we cover in our courses. Part III outlines the risks and challenges of teaching Italian American literature as Italian American instructors. Our conclusion reflects on the timeliness of including Italian American voices into one's syllabus to engender the kinds of conversations students are seeking to have today in the face of heightened awareness of racist violence, political movements seeking to curtail expressions of individual identity, and growing socioeconomic disparities in the United States.

Part I: Approaching Our Courses as Italian American Faculty

Olivia Kate Cerrone

As a university educator with almost twenty years of teaching experience, including Italian American authors is a standard part of the multiethnic literature, composition, and creative writing curriculums I design and teach. I also incorporate Italian American literature into creative writing seminars and multi-week workshops at nonprofit creative writing centers like GrubStreet.

I include Italian American authors in the literary-intensive composition courses I teach at Bunker Hill Community College, such as Domenica Ruta's memoir With or Without You (2013). This book offers a piercing examination of her working-class Italian American roots through the dysfunctional relationship with her flamboyant, drug-addicted mother, who also sold drugs. Ruta depicts a childhood dominated by poverty, violence, sexual abuse, and instability, while also chronicling her own recovery from alcoholism, and an eventual estrangement from her mother. Her memoir examines complex themes for academic exploration, but also affected me in a very personal capacity. As an Italian American from a working-class background, my own family has experienced many similar experiences Ruta depicts in With or Without You. Encountering such a portrayal of the Italian American experience, one free of sentimentality, and allowing for the expression of divergent possibilities, continues to be a powerful, even formative text for me, as it was the first time I'd seen myself accurately reflected in literature. As Michel Foucault (1979) believed, identity is constructed through an ongoing discourse, defined through an ever-evolving expression of oneself to others (222–23).

One of the qualities of many Italian American narratives such as With or Without You is the ability of the text to hold and portray extremes, sometimes even polarizing truths or realities, together on the same page. For example, Ruta's depiction of an Italian American mother, which is often portrayed in the mainstream media as affectionate, overprotective, and dedicated to cooking and cleaning for the family, is instead made complicated by darker traits. Ruta's experience of an Italian American mother is one devoted to advancing her daughter's future promise and education through engaging in nefarious enterprises such as selling cocaine and welfare fraud, and even inviting her to partake in such drugs, while also providing expensive clothing, toys, and other comforts. Such complex, often disturbing, and nuanced portrayals of Italian American identities break down stereotypes and sentimental notions of what Italian American identity should be, while also offering a subtle critique of certain societal systems and institutions. In Ruta's case, those systems specifically related to the 1980s working-class world of a single mother and child living on welfare and the often dysfunctional and oppressive forces at play; Ruta herself lacked a support network that could protect her from an often chaotic and dangerous home life. Such a text also enables thematic connections to be made across diverse spheres.

Paired with authors such as Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, and Colson Whitehead, Italian American literature fosters essential academic conversations among students, inviting them to engage in and challenge mainstream interpretations of what it means to be an American today in such difficult and complicated times. Synthesizing these texts is not meant to equate the experiences and inherent suffering portrayed in this literature; instead, it is meant to give students more opportunities to examine and build connections between lives and realities perhaps once assumed existed worlds apart. With over 60 percent of Bunker Hill Community College's student population being of color, it is essential to create a curriculum that resonates with both students and the racial and social injustices we face today. I teach Ruta's With or Without You alongside Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1994) and The House on Mango Street (1984) by Sandra Cisneros. Students write essays examining the commonalities between these books, embarking upon a thematic investigation into the racial and socioeconomic oppression ongoing within society, one that also allowed for personal reflection. In synthesizing these texts, a synergy often occurs in student-led observations, revealing that despite the very different ethnic and racial origins of the curriculum's literature, there arise similar patterns rooted in socioeconomic and racial inequality. Patterns emerge, ones which shape lives and personal choices, some leading to devastating consequences. Students examine the ways in which one's personal identity and familial dynamics are influenced through larger themes of racism, gender discrimination, poverty, violence, drug addiction, alcoholism, and intergenerational abuse existing across various ethnic and racial spaces. Building these connections invites students to share and express their own experiences in a nurturing, safe, and empowering learning environment that invites vulnerability through personal expression and academic discourse.

In non-university learning environments, like GrubStreet, I teach Marco Rafalà’s novel How Fires End (2019) in a multi-week historical fiction workshop. Students discuss Rafalà’s work in how it reveals the long-lasting influence of intergenerational war trauma on a Sicilian American family. They adapt these observations to a practical application within their own fiction, deepening areas of character development and trauma-informed behavior.

Kathy Curto

I teach creative nonfiction and memoir in a variety of settings: at a large public university, in community centers in both rural and urban settings, and in a writing institute on the campus of a small liberal arts college. This spectrum of learning spaces means I am afforded the opportunity to engage with a range of people whose life stories inevitably include personal explorations around identity. In these spaces, we examine, using both writing exercises and readings from literature, our values and understood norms around gender, ethnicity, race, class, religion, sexual orientation, age, and ability. Honoring these lenses means using a variety of readings and texts, including ones written by Italian American and Italian writers. I also share with students my own experience writing from a place of memory and how being an Italian American woman influences that process intellectually, creatively, and emotionally. Prior to serving as a panelist and participating in the Italian American Studies Association Conference at the Calandra Institute in November 2021, I had not explored deeply the origin and implications of braiding Italian American and Italian texts into my syllabi. I just braided them in, quite naturally.

Collaborating on this analysis with my colleagues has taken that natural impulse and deepened it. Listening to the ways both Olivia Kate Cerrone and Julia Lisella view their own identities as having influence on the construction of syllabi and approaches to class design, widens my understanding of the power one's heritage can have and also illuminates some common challenges.

For example, the desire to diversify the literary offerings I present to students has been a constant for me as an instructor, something I took away from the teachers who offered that to me. Some of the richest discourse that we can have in writing and literature classrooms stems from exposure to varied stories, reflecting lives and perspectives similar and different from our own. This process invites disruption but also discovery.

I remind myself and my students all the time: I have both found and lost myself in literature.

My impulse to include Italian American and Italian selections on my reading lists is both political and personal. Speaking of discovery, here is one that surfaced in this research: it was my mother who first introduced me to what I call my Italian American identity. She spoke the language, cooked the food, and practiced many of the rituals and customs, internally and externally. I believe this realization, this knowing, shines a light on the process of working with students who grapple with their own personal histories and with belonging, identity, family trauma, and loss. Love, too. My Italian American identity, and the textures, flavors, sights, sounds, and smells that surround it, does not stand still. My identity is ever evolving and growing, and so are the courses I design and the texts I choose to integrate.

Julia Lisella

I relate to Kathy's notion about the fluid nature of our Italian American identity and often reflect on its presence and influence in my approach to teaching and what I teach. As someone trained as both an academic and an artist, and given my experience working with these texts, I am surprised at this late stage that I still sometimes hesitate when revising my course syllabi to include an additional Italian American voice, still wondering if I am “trespassing” into unacceptable academic realms, or worried that I may be accused of self-indulgence by including the voices of writers from my own ethnic group (Dana Gioia called it “ethnic boosterism” in his well-known essay “What Is Italian American Poetry?” [1997]), rather than being credited with academic and pedagogical rigor. For I have experienced how Italian American texts allow students better access to the decoding of the elisions of class, ethnicity, and race in American society, enrich their understanding of the immigrant experience, the experience of assimilation, class struggle, trauma, and other issues that students sometimes struggle to articulate, and offer them ways to analyze the role of family dynamics in identity formation that other texts might not be able to do as clearly, emotionally, or directly.

Because of the wide range of courses I teach, from US literature surveys to more specialized courses and courses in creative writing, I am able to introduce students to both contemporary and classic Italian American texts. For example, Juliet Grames's The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna (2019) offers my students a more contemporary look at the historical family saga, revealing aspects of family dynamics not revealed in earlier generations’ recounting of immigration. Italian American feminist texts that recast political history, like Jennifer Martelli's My Tarantella (2018), expose an undercurrent of misogyny that affects both individuals and the wider community. Pairing the nineteenth-century text by Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills ([1861] 1972), with Olivia Kate Cerrone's The Hunger Saint (2017) enables students to recognize the legacy of labor struggles and the historical and cultural traumas that bind us across generations.

Rather than “trespassing” on the institutions I have been trained by, then, this creative syllabi-building can bring change to those institutions by pressing against the very hard edges of the American literary canon. In addition to exposing our students to new ways of thinking about, for example, racial and ethnic identity in America, labor struggles, women's rights, and family trauma, this work can also help to break down the stereotypes, prejudices, and preconceived notions of what it means to be Italian in America. And the need for this is real both for Italian American students and for students from non-Italian backgrounds—as we learned from Jonathan Cavallero's (2021) IASA presentation this past November of the Pixar film Luca, the stereotypes of Italians in America continue to be pervasive and do not only affect Americans of Italian descent but shape the way Americans think of the “other” more generally. Presenting more writings from Italian American authors complicates for the students the story they think they understand about how racial and ethnic prejudices are formed and whom they affect. Additionally, it enables us as instructors to play a primary role in supporting the literary tradition from which we come and transforming the literary canon to hold more voices of Italian descent.

Part II: Practice, Strategies, and Impact

Olivia Kate Cerrone

The intentional inclusion of Italian American literature is a strategy I utilize in multiethnic classes to access specific course topics. For example, I teach “The Socially Conscious Storyteller” as part of Suffolk University's First-Year Seminar program. This course emphasizes the teaching and study of “socially conscious” literature as a means for students to consider the role that fiction writing plays in examining social justice issues. Students read a wide selection of multiethnic historical fiction, including Christopher Castellani's Leading Men (2019), with a focus on how literature portrays complex social issues. In addition, students write their own historical fiction as a means of further understanding how fiction can be used as a tool for social change through spreading greater awareness and critical thinking. Students examine how the character of Frank Merlo served as a character study, connecting themes of identity, history, and LGBTQIA discrimination. For Frank, his working-class, Italian American origins are a continuous presence in his narrative, one influencing his ever-volatile fifteen-year relationship with the legendary American playwright Tennessee Williams during the 1950s, to struggles over his queer identity during a time of little mainstream acceptance of homosexuality. His response to one of the more traumatic events of the book, involving a brutal mob attack, is a silence rooted in his Italian American upbringing: “Frank saw no reason to ever mention the horrible events again. If the Merlos of Peterstown, New Jersey, had taught him anything, it was to keep ugliness out—with happy talk, with food, with music and out loud dreaming—until it forced its way in” (Castellani 2019, 114).

Students draw comparisons between Frank's behavior and Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer and National Book Award–winning novel The Underground Railroad (2016), involving the young enslaved Cora, who struggles to comprehend the loss of her mother, who escapes their plantation unannounced. The other enslaved people soon turn against orphaned Cora, and Cora is later violently assaulted. Instead of compassion, Cora is met with silence and alienation from others: “If anyone heard or saw, they did not intervene . . . no worthy man paid her notice after that day,” leaving her with a sense of betrayal as “white men eat you up, but sometimes colored folk eat you up, too” (Whitehead 2016, 21).

This absorption of trauma, along with the enforced silence and estrangement from her community in response to her assault, influences Cora's own inevitable decision to escape the plantation, propelling the novel forward.

My Suffolk University students reflect upon and make connections between the course readings and their own creative writing assignment, an original work of historical fiction focused on a specific social concern. Building from their examination of Frank Merlo and Cora, students analyze how history and social issues shaped the identities of their characters. One student describes how “the social issue I chose for my fiction, anti-Semitism, connects to the identities of my characters because it is a strong part of their appearance as Ultra-Orthodox Jews and everyday customs such as daily prayer, which some are forced to do in private. In my story, some characters try to hide the larger parts of their identity to avoid death or violence, as Frank Merlo hid his relationship with Tennessee from the public to avoid violence.” Another student is inspired by the stories of her grandparents’ experiences during the Vietnam War. She explains that after reading Leading Men and The Underground Railroad, she gained a “better understanding of her grandfather's struggles with the hardships of life for the South Vietnamese after the War . . . how making the choice of being Communist or non-Communist affected almost everything during the war, and why he was forced to leave the city for rural life because of a lack of jobs and violent oppression.”

This assignment illuminates connections between Italian American and multiethnic texts but also sheds new light on the ways in which students form such interactions across diverse literature through establishing such intimate and personal connections, including reflections upon their own identities and family histories. These observations inform and deepen my pedagogy and the approaches I continue to develop.

Kathy Curto

As an educator, I often meditate on how both teachers and students learn from the literature we consider. My best days in the classroom and writing circles happen organically when literary work prompts healing, invites honest inquiry about identity, and honors small details in a life. This feeds a wider understanding of self and others.

With these ideas in mind and in the context of this article, I consider these questions: How is Italian American literature received in classes where not only the contemporary topics are diverse and varied but so are the required readings and, if we are lucky, so are the students? What unique dynamics surface when we offer Italian American literature into our diverse literature and writing classrooms?

I use three themes to guide this exploration of my practice and strategies in the classroom:

• a.

  healing

• b.

  modeling for students how identity shapes learning and

• c.

  honoring the specifics in a life.

Healing

In both my creative writing and literature classes it is inevitable that the range of weighty and complex topics permeate our explorations, and this has only increased over the past two years or so. It is not just the pandemic-related issues, though they are part of it. What surfaces in the lives of everyday people experiencing movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, the uptick in hate crimes and gun violence, environmental crises initiatives as well as just navigating the saturated landscape of information, factual and nonfactual? The answers can be daunting for anyone, but especially for students. As a way to address this onslaught of realities, typically, in all instructional settings where we will be generating new work and discussing the work of others (both peers and published writers), I offer students a chance to warm up by digging into a ten-minute writing practice at the start of our time together. My design for the exercise stems from one poet Rita Dove created entitled the Ten-Minute Spill. Incidentally, it is a variation of an exercise offered to her by her instructors when she was a graduate student.

Like Dove, I continue to learn from my teachers and from the writers whose work I admire. My version of her Ten-Minute Spill is the Ten-Minute Toss. Students choose a question from a list of very open-ended prompts designed to provoke in-the-moment thinking and feeling and then they write for ten minutes in a diary-like style. They know there is no obligation to share from this work, just to go to the page and write. Emphasis is placed on reminding students to slow down, breathe and write freely.

This practice offers students a space to find that singular sense of freedom that comes from letting yourself go on a blank page, and hopefully begin the process of writing, wondering, and yes, healing.

It also allows for an introduction to Italian American writer Louise DeSalvo, and her work on healing, Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. Again, an invitation: “This book is an invitation for you to use the simple act of writing as a way of reimagining who you are or remembering who you were. To use writing to discover and fulfill your deepest desire. To accept pain, fear, uncertainty, strife. But to find, too, a place of safety, security, and joyfulness. To claim your voice, to tell your story. And to share the gift of your work with others, and so, enrich and deepen our understanding of the human condition” (DeSalvo 1999, 9).

In memoir and life-story writing classes, I pair DeSalvo's instruction with Kiese Laymon's memoir Heavy, offering students a chance to consider and see an example of the fruits of life writing and healing.

Laymon, using the second person here as he does throughout his memoir, speaking directly to his mother: “I will offer you my heart. I will offer you my head. I will offer you my body, my imagination, and my memory. I will ask you to give us a chance at a more meaningful process of healing. If we fall, give us a chance to fall honestly, compassionately together. The nation as it is currently constituted has never dealt with a yesterday or tomorrow where we were radically honest, generous, and tender with each other” (Laymon 2018, 239).

Working with Heavy and Writing as a Way of Healing in the classroom, I am able to offer prompts and support to create a conversation about identity and struggle. We talk about what these writers claim, what they are telling stories about, who the writers are/were, and why it matters. And how writing and healing intersect. Laymon and DeSalvo have two very different personal histories and styles, yet their work, each in their own way promoting healing through writing, offers a launching pad for all writers, emerging and established, to tell their own stories.

Identity

As noted in part I of this paper, I talk openly about my Italian American identity and my desire to share the work of Italian American colleagues in my classes. It is my hope that for some students it makes the whole process of learning more fluid and natural, creating an opening to wonder and for more dialogue. For example, I currently teach a class, Introduction to Creative Nonfiction, that I consider to be racially and ethnically diverse. Introducing work that is also diverse and, in some cases, on the outskirts of the easily defined can be exciting and bold. And having Italian American authors as part of this, especially couched in conversations about one's own ethnic, racial, gender, and/or sexual identity, makes for rich discourse. An example: When we read excerpts of coming-of-age memoirs, in addition to Wolff's This Boy's Life (1989), Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1979), Karr's Cherry (2021), and Diaz's Ordinary Girls (2019), I also offer slices of Beverly Donofrio's Riding in Cars with Boys (1990); her own life of twists and turns enlivens the class discussion. In a 2013 essay on living through tragedy with faith and belief in the healing process, she notes:

Inevitably we move into talking about the way literature reminds us of leaving, belonging and, again, where we come from. Identity seasons those passages in life and having a range of voices, including those of the Italian American memoirist, contributes to the varied textures and voices that can fortify the syllabus and design of writing classes.

Specifics

This is where my passion for two things intersects: helping students honor the small, tiny details in everyday life AND braiding in the work of Italian American colleagues and associates.

Through storytelling, remembering, and writing I continue to see how critical it is to flip the first part of that usual line we hear so often in this society: Go Big or Go Home.

Here's my version: Go Small and Go Home.

Italian American poets like Maria Lisella and Mary Russo Demetrick demonstrate how tiny details and textured specifics can be ways to bring our work to life. Pairing Lisella's “Since You Asked” and Demetrick's “I Study Italian” with Joe Brainard's I Remember offers a chance to see the small details that help to shape a day, a life.

Note the parallels:

Small nods to everyday life. This kind of literature, with an emphasis on detail and description, encourages readers and writers to think about how culture, language, and customs shape life experience.

Each individual story allows for more universal connections to emerge, bridging common themes and ideas across cultures, generations, and societies—deepening our larger humanity with Italian American literature as a vital component.

Julia Lisella

I am continuously surprised at the ability of my students to identify with some of the characters that these texts introduce. We were studying Mario Puzo's novel The Fortunate Pilgrim ([1964] 2004) in my class called US Stories of Immigration and Migration right about the time that we were forced out of the classroom and onto Zoom in March of 2020. As an instructor, I benefitted from the students already having established a fairly cohesive group face to face; everyone felt committed to reproducing what had been a really lively and engaged class from January through mid-March, and the students were able to continue to transition well to discussions and group work via Zoom breakout rooms. Situated near the end of my course, the novel functions as a fulcrum to connect earlier material with the more contemporary experiences recounted in short stories and poems that appear in the final few weeks of the course. Many of the discussion questions asked them to compare experiences of characters from Puzo's novel with characters from Anzia Yezierska's novel The Bread Givers ([1925] 1999), stories by Sui Sin Far about Chinese immigration, Nella Larsen's Quicksand ([1928] 2002) , and a variety of stories from Willa Cather's novel, My Antonia ([1918] 2015) in which the focus is on mostly northern European immigrants but in which other ethnic groups are explored, notably Italians and African Americans.

My class in 2020 was highly diverse both in terms of majors and in terms of ethnicity, age, gender, life experiences, and their generational relationship to immigration, with some students having been born in the US, and some arriving as children, and others as teens. And it was very easy for them to connect to the tensions between first- and second-generation characters in Puzo's novel. They saw many overlaps in terms of the role of the social worker in immigrant stories and the conflict between the state and the individual (particularly in comparison with Sui Sin Far's story “In the Land of the Free” [(1912) 2013]). But the two elements of Puzo's novel that took them by surprise were the internal hierarchy and snobbery of the educated Italians to the working-class Italians that Puzo draws out so artfully, and the plight of and courage and independence of the women in the novel, particularly Lucia Santa and Octavia.

As context for the novel, both in 2020 and this year, I assigned Brent Staples's essay, “How Italians Became ‘White,’” which had appeared in the New York Times in 2019. The editorial was a reckoning by a New York Times writer of the history of racist rhetoric in the pages of the Times a century before. Students in 2020 were curious about this choice as they could find no evident discussion of race in Puzo's novel and did not see how Brent Staples's essay could have much to do with Puzo's characters. No one in the novel, they argued, seemed to be treated with racial prejudice and in fact there are barely any non-Italian characters in the novel. This began a rich discussion about the ways in which racial prejudice can be encoded in other forms of prejudice, for example, socioeconomic—we discussed the various social “levels” of Italians in the novel. In the 2020 class, as we talked about the history of racial prejudice against Italians, as outlined in the Brent Staples essay, students, many of whom would not consider themselves white, began to reflect on their own experiences. One older student, a woman from Venezuela who had immigrated to the US alone as a teenager, spoke eloquently of raising Afro-Latina-Italian American daughters with her third-generation Italian American husband. Would they identify as white or biracial, or as simply the children of immigrants, with its own categories of experiences? In 2022, several of my students have noted the ways in which various immigrants from various novels and stories we read also proceeded from suspicion of otherness to “whiteness” or “acceptability.” So Puzo's novel gives us an opportunity to compare the ways in which immigrants have been racialized over the course of our history, with some immigrants glorified as hard workers while others are barred from the country.

Puzo's novel is probably one of the easiest novels to integrate into a syllabus of immigrant literature. The trajectory of the novel favors the progressive discourse of Americanization, from poverty and communal life toward single-family home ownership on Long Island, and toward securing the privileges of the white middle class, toward the American Dream. The final scene echoes the scene of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the mother clutching the plant, the hope of private family life in the suburbs, anathema to the tenement lives at the heart of the experience of both ethnic groups. Contrasted with this classic novel are the stories that do not use that American dream script. These novels disrupt my students’ expectations of the Euro-immigrant, as in Pietro DiDonato's Christ in Concrete ([1939] 1993), which is radically political in its excoriation of capitalism's hold on uneducated immigrants. They face the social work system, the courts, and they are helpless against them. Or as in Juliet Grames's family saga, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna (2019), which offers a more complex vision of family, gender, and class. Grames's reliance on research, family lore, and archival documents interests my students as they begin to think about what they do and do not know of their own families’ stories. The students also gravitate toward the novel's depictions of ancient traditions and superstitions, and they appreciate how they are woven into the fabric of the novel. Some students resist or get impatient at the novel's insistence on incorporating words from Calabrian dialect and want a glossary. We discuss the politics of such inclusions. The class also heavily debates the inclusion of stories of sexual trauma in this immigrant tale, which undercuts our notions of the noble immigrant. In short, this text allows students to imagine new ways of revealing our histories.

Part III: Opportunities and Risks

Olivia Kate Cerrone

Cultivating a tradition of intentionally teaching Italian American literature in multiethnic courses fosters more nuanced representations and expressions of Italian American identity in the wider world. I seldom remember experiencing classes where Italian American literature was taught during my own educational experience, which led me on a personal odyssey to track down anthologies like The Milk of Almonds by Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta or Helen Barolini's The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writing by Italian American Women. The lack of Italian American authors in a multiethnic literature and/or creative writing classroom limits the expression of the American experience. Including these works in our classrooms gives students the opportunity to make connections between communities and ethnic identities they may not have otherwise.

As an educator, I am fortunate to be met with a more positive, collaborative response within the institutions at which I have taught. Although they seem open and ready for the integration of these voices into the collaboration, I had no model for how to approach this in the classroom, so it was essential for me to bring Italian American authors into larger conversations with other multiethnic authors, where universal themes became the focus, allowing students to establish personal connections to the literature.

In addition, I also host classroom events with Italian American authors like Christopher Castellani and Marco Rafalà. This creates opportunities for students to engage in a more personal way. Students often express their enjoyment of these events; one noted how meeting the authors of the books we studied helped make the literature “more real.”

Kathy Curto

I was introduced to Italian American literature when I met and studied with Joe Papaleo in the late-1980s as an undergrad. His work and guidance were pivotal forces in my early intellectual life, mostly because it was really the very first time I identified Italian American life stories (particularly working-class ones) as being part of an academic setting. I can't say, though, that I was offered much after this. I found the strong female Italian American voices from my own research. Part of my desire to be engaged in the Italian American writing community and to share this connection with students stems from a longing to see the varied stories of Italian American artists and writers told.

Including Italian American voices in a multiethnic syllabus or reading list not only invites conversation and prompts thinking about sameness and difference but it also offers new ways of thinking about Italian American life as well as what it means to be an Italian American educator in today's times. Working on this IASA presentation created a space for me to wonder and learn not only about the range of literature we can use but also about the diversity of our motivations as instructors.

Julia Lisella

I think it is essential for Italian American university faculty who teach contemporary American writing to include Italian American texts in their syllabi whether one is a “specialist” in the field or not. Many resources for doing so are available today that were more challenging to come by a few decades ago. For example, the MLA publication Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (2010), edited by Edvige Giunta and Kathleen Zamboni McCormick, is an excellent resource for teaching ideas and authors to include in your courses.

Not only will this inclusion enliven the classroom and push the American literary canon into new directions; it also opens up the place for our own subjectivity. This, of course has its rewards as well as its challenges! As an instructor, I sometimes have felt myself needing, but also resisting the need, to “explain” some of the more idiosyncratically “Italian” moments in some of the works I've presented to my students, for fear of exoticizing and further distancing my students from the material and, thus, perhaps contributing to their long-held notions of what Italian Americanism means in the US. I also do not want my students to come away feeling one can only understand the corno in Stella Fortuna or the walnut eating scenes in The Fortunate Pilgrim if one is Italian, and yet in some sense I do play the cultural tour guide for my students. Sometimes they meet these moments of “Italianess” tentatively as these images of Italian Americans are different from what they thought they knew of Italians or what has been fed to them by social media, film, and TV, but these moments of discomfort for both my students and me help usher in yet another point of discussion about preconceived notions about various ethnic groups. In sum, it's important for Italian American instructors to include these voices unapologetically, but to be ready to face students’ preconceived notions, and to wrestle with our roles as instructors who have, to not excuse the pun, skin in the game.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this intentional practice of including Italian American voices into our syllabi matters in today's classrooms. Literature enables us to break down stereotypes and highlight timely social issues at the heart of our greater humanity. The teaching experiences and the development of syllabi, strategies, and approaches that we have explored have the potential to deepen student engagement. It remains imperative that we, as educators, give our students ample opportunities and nurturing spaces to engage in a critical discourse that challenges and transforms our ideas about identity and oppression in all its forms. The intentional inclusion of Italian American literary voices is an ever-evolving process. As we hope our essay makes clear, more Italian American voices are being published (and often by mainstream presses) that are not telling the stereotypical stories of Italian identity that American culture has come to rely on—the mafioso, the emotional and happy poor, and so forth, and they are available to include in multiethnic syllabi. This literature often highlights the complexity of class, race, and gender. Classic texts can be made more relevant to a wider, more diverse student body by introducing critical contemporary discussions as context. And teaching Italian American texts alongside other narratives of racial and ethnic identities opens up more avenues to discuss these issues in our classrooms. These practices can enrich the conversations about identity and culture both inside and outside the academic setting for students and teachers alike.

Works Cited