Articles by: Anthony julian Tamburri

  • Art & Culture

    Rethinking our Labels

    If when talking about our identity we also approach the notion of whiteness and all that it pertains, we find ourselves on a most slippery slope. This is not to say that we should not broach such subject matter.

    On the contrary, being of southern European origins, we know that historically we have not

    always been considered white, and as a result, those of the great migration who hailed from below the “Linea Spezia” were in fact placed into a non- white category for a period of time. Hence, our obligation to negotiate said slippery slope seems thus inevitable; it is an obligation for both the scholar and the community leader.

    The risk of such a discussion is to fall into a trap of flat, superficial analysis and thereby not consider the complexities of neither ethnicity nor “whiteness” as we know both concepts today; as a result, one may not recognize the multi-strata characteristic of any “white” ethnic group and therefore present an incomplete portrait of the group at hand. In order to avoid this, we must force ourselves to let go of some of our traditional historic-thematic perspectives that rein still among certain dominant culturalists, or within what are now nicely bleached, “white” ethnic communities.

    We need to open up conversations regarding all aspects of our communities. A European ethnic group’s essentialist identification with “whiteness” may indeed prove counter-productive. Such identification may suffocate, indeed eliminate, the possibility of diverse characterizations of one’s ethnicity. Especially if internal, such ethnicity would figure as an homogenous group of people who identify with mainstream (read, WASP), when, instead, we know very well that intra-ethnic tensions do indeed exist precisely because these groups prove not homogenous, and various occasions have provoked animated, internal dialogue in recent years.

    Further still, identification with WASPdom may very well lead to an exclusively “celebratory packaging of the past [which] often forgets ... histories of oppression and intimidation,” as one critic stated (Anagnostou 2009, 11). Such tensions were and continue to be evident in a number of European ethnicities. We see this in the various two-flagged, double-national hymned celebratory galas and other such events that, if not negotiated accordingly, may cause said ethnicity to stagnate; for it is by now common acceptance that ethnicity does indeed evolve to some degree from one generation to the next. If we do not recognize as much, then the consequence is that hegemonic past myths persist, and ethnic divisions — internal and external — arise.

    What I am discussing here is self-management of one’s ethnicity, as I have already done elsewhere (Tamburri 1991, 2014). As we know, the southern European has the option — indeed, the privilege — to identify as an Italian in one situation and as an American (read, white) in another. This is, in fact, the privilege of the “white ethnic,” which is also the conundrum of those who engage in any sort of ethnic discourse, be that discourse academic or more broadly public. The combination of and/ or the shifting to and fro between “Italian” and “American” have, on occasion, excluded from its identification some arbitrarily undesirable historic components that may actually continue to co-buttress said ethnicity — something that is characteristic of a certain component of the Italian community in the States.

    In eschewing said past histories, we can readily get caught up in a situation of diachronic amnesia for which any lack of knowledge of our ancestors’ trials and tribulations during the proverbial four- decade period of 1880-1924 adumbrates such past challenges.

    As a consequence, we may fall into a state of synchronicity for which current phenomena rein and all connections to the past are lost precisely because, as a result of socio-economic progress and all that it may signify to those “moving on up,” we erroneously adopt the assumption that southern European immigrants and their progeny have assimilated into mainstream America. What we have witnessed elsewhere, instead, is that such assumptions often prove false.

    What we also know from some scholars is that “ethnicity is a process of inter-reference between two or more cultural traditions” (Fischer, 195) — i.e., different ethnic cultures — and, I would add, between two or more generations of the same ethnic group. The consequence of such amnesia may, in fact, be an inability to recognize affinities between the above-mentioned trials and tribulations of our ancestors and our migrant ethnics today, all of which may result in a willy- nilly insensitivity toward current day immigration to the United States. What we thus need to do is to dismantle those long-held notions of “whiteness” and its power to aggregate various groups into one vast cluster of, in our case, seemingly assimilated southern Europeans.

    We need to destabilize “white ethnicity as a bounded category” with the specific goal of “affirm[ing] commonalities and confirm[ing] differences” in order to promote, in the end, “a network of scholarly entanglements instead of isolated nodes of inquiry” (Anagnostou 2013, 122). “Whiteness” surely remains within the conversation of ethnic discourse, but it undergoes, along the way, a series of interrogations and analyses that eventually underscore its malleability of signification. 

    Works Cited

    Georgios Anagnostou. Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America. The Ohio University Press, 2009. —— . “White Ethnicity: A Reappraisal,” Italian American Review 3.2 (2013): 99–128. Michael M. J. Fischer. “Ethnicity and the Post- modern Arts of Memory,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds. University of California Press, 1986. Anthony Julian Tamburri. Re-reading Italian Americana: Generalities and Specificities on Literature and Criticism. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. 3-25. ——. To Hyphenate or not to Hyphenate: the Italian/American Writer: Or, An Other American? Guernica Editions, 1991.

  • The Dehumanization of The “Other”



        
    A significant number of these migrants are coming from middle-eastern and/or Mediterranean, war-torn countries, where previous governments — despotic for sure — have been crushed and their leaders subsequently eliminated through incarceration if not swift execution. Unfortunately, what remains in those countries is a series of weak national governments that exist only because they have the protection of the military. The bulk of the population, middle- to working-class, is left to fend for themselves.


    Where, in addition, religion has come into play — and it has indeed in no small part — no one perceived to be of the opposite faith is spared. It becomes for many, in a literal sense, a question of life and death. So much so is this the case, that those who do leave, do so in an abjectly desperate attempt to save theirs and their family's lives in spite of the tremendous gamble involved. Sadly,     Aylan, the three-year-old boy in the photo seen around the world, and his brother, Galip, whose bodies washed up on shore yesterday, will never see another day.

    Like the infamously tragic events of the past caught in photos — from the naked Vietnamese girl of the 1970s and other photos chronicling subsequent tragedies — perhaps this one will serve as the wake-up call, it should surely be — for Europe and the rest of the world, the U.S. Included — to do something, finally, to end such senseless loss of life. In so doing, we need also to be aware of the power of language. What do I mean? At the opening I used the phrase “in flux” instead of emigration, immigration, or, perhaps more desirable of the three, migration, a term more frequently used among public officials and scholars these days. But that term, as well as the previous two, may have its negative effect. It may readily call to mind, as I believe it often does, the notion of one’s stereotypical image of the so-called “illegal” immigrant who enters a country in the most clandestine of manners, and (1) steals jobs from the local citizens, and (2) engages in violent acts against those same local citizens.


    We know, instead, that recent figures in the United States debunk such biases and prejudices. Thus, the demystification of such stereotypes lies in both a new awareness of the situation at hand — that immigrants have a lower crime rate — as well as in the language we use. We need to be better aware of the power of language and how, in an attempt to be cute, if not seriously clever, we engage in a linguistic dehumanization of our brethren, especially those who are forced into a life-saving, and at the same time life-threatening, exodus from their homeland.

    What do I mean by linguistic dehumanization? There are numerous examples from the past century of verbal description and visual images in which the Italian immigrant was presented in a most dehumanizing manner: either disposed of by being placed in a cage and dunked into a river or, more insidious, being represented as creatures with human heads and rodent bodies. This, one might say, is of the past. For sure, I am speaking of written and visual representations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. So, then, allow me to use a more recent example, one that has its origins in the current presidential campaign of our neighboring state’s governor/presidential candidate Chris Christie.

    A few days ago Christie stated that “[y]ou go on online and at any moment, FedEx can tell you where [your] package is. […] Yet we let people come into this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them.” Christie went on to state that FedEx could surely advise the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on how to set up a system for tracking people. Well, as I have quoted ad nauseam, this recalls the 1990 C+C Music Factory’s disco hit, “Things That Make You Go Hmmm.” That is to say, with his statement Christie automatically reduced all visitors to the United States as packages, parcel post: things readily tracked in a continuum so we always know where they are.

    When reported by the New York Times, we read, that “A FedEx spokeswoman declined to comment on Mr. Christie’s remarks.” The follow-up question, to be sure (and pardon my sarcasm), would be, “Is a signature required?” Of course no one from FedEx would respond. The more serious question, of course, is, “Has Christie, an American of both Irish and Italian descent, forgotten his roots?” The dehumanization of such thoughts reeks of the above-mentioned late nineteenth-century nativism, when the Italians (and the Irish before them) were treated as the fundamentally indentured laborers they were. Further still, as already mentioned above, they were depicted as half human in the popular press of the time.

    The question that remains, I presume, is, “How have we arrived at this moment in our history, given the tragedies of the Nazi and Fascist European regimes of the ventennio nero as well as the more progressive social and gender changes of the 1960s and 1970s both here in the United States and abroad?” We in the U.S. are a nation of immigrants; we are children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of those who have built, indeed rebuilt, this nation, especially after the civil war of 1860. Somewhere along the line, a notion of “pure” Americanism —whatever that may be — has risen its ugly head, obscuring — especially with regard to those of southern European ancestry (read, Italians) — the prejudiced history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century toward the European immigrant who came here and dug the mines, paved the roads, and built the bridges: work that “Americans” of that time left to the swarthy immigrants from places like Italy, for example.

    Is this what the despair of electoral politics breeds? Does the desire to win cancel out all sense of decency toward those who are here today, as well as toward those whose grandparents came a century ago? Does, to return to the tragic photo of Aylan, the hegemony of one religion grant to those who follow said religion the right to dehumanize, indeed execute in instances, their religious “others” to the point of driving them to risk their lives purely to survive?

    I repeat, in closing, that the United States has and continues to be a nation of immigrants, dating back to the days of the Mayflower, to overstate the obvious, up through the great migration of 1880 to 1924, not to mention more recent years. Yet, we, too, in our own way, have fallen prey to the fear of the foreigner, a paradox to be sure. Could it be that because of an unawareness of our past histories, we got caught up in a situation of diachronic amnesia for which any lack of knowledge of our ancestors’ trials and tribulations during the proverbial four-decade period of 1880-1924 adumbrates such past challenges and blinds us to the current challenges of the new immigrants? Have we thus fallen into a state of synchronicity for which current phenomena rein and all connections to the past are lost precisely because, as a result of socio-economic progress and all that it may signify to those “moving on up,” we erroneously adopt the assumption that southern European immigrants and their progeny have assimilated into mainstream America? The consequence of such amnesia may, in fact, be an inability to recognize affinities between the above-mentioned trials and tribulations of our ancestors and those who are “in flux” today, all of which may result in a willy-nilly insensitivity toward current day immigration both to the United States as well as elsewhere.

    The ignorance of such histories clamors oh so loudly. Che volgarità, ragazzi!

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    Anthony Julian Tamburri is Dean of The John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, (Queens College, CUNY) and Distinguished Professor of European Languages and Literatures. His latest authored book is Re-reading Italian Americana: Generalities and Specificities on Literature and Criticism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014).