A stranger in the villaggio: Italian Studies, American Studies, jazz, and the transnational turn

Abstract

I enter this conversation from an oblique angle, if not quite as a complete outsider. I do not work in the fi eld 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 fi rmly af fi liated 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 fi eld 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 fi nished my PhD. Despite these stunning disquali fi cations — or, actually, because of them — I embrace this invitation to re fl ect 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 notwith-standing my tenuous relationship to the fi eld 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