https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1220-6175
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ABSTRACT
In the complex and varied history of Italian migration to the United States, the Californian experience has stood out for the original dynamics of its mobility, especially in relation to the transit of Italians to Los Angeles. This article investigates three descriptions of the Italian experience in Los Angeles in different moments in the city’s history as provided by three authors who embody different transnational Italian perspectives, namely John Fante’s Ask the Dust (1939), Andrea De Carlo’s Treno di panna (1983) and Chiara Barzini’s Things that Happened before the Earthquake (2017). This article explores how these representations of the Los Angeles experience have contributed to broadening the representation of Italian youth abroad. At the same time, my analysis identifies how the Italian experience has expanded the prism of literary interpretations of the city and deepened the knowledge of the metropolis and its dense stratification of ethnic communities and cultures.
Acknowledgments
Beyond the referenced sources, this article is the result of two years’ worth of inspired discussions and conversations at California State University, Long Beach, where I was based as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence before and as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow afterwards. Along with the students of the classes I taught, I would like to thank all the colleagues with whom I had the privilege to work in the Romance, German and Russian Languages and Literatures Department for their contribution to my knowledge of the Los Angeles area and its multiple cultures, and in particular: Clorinda Donato, Stephen Cooper, Aparna Nayak, Jeffrey L. High, Enrico Vettore, Markus Muller, Robert Blankenship, Jeannette Acevedo Rivera, Daniel Herrera Cepero, Adrià Martín-Mor, Sienna Hopkins, Daniela Zappador Guerra, Daniela Suarez, Manuel Romero and Alessandro Russo. I would also like to thank the journal editors and the unknown reviewers for their generous and invaluable work, which suggested how to make my argument sharper and more consistent.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For example, Andrew Watman, Louis Bell, Jack Antonoff and Lana Del Rey, Fuck It I Love You, 2019; and Angel Olsen and Emmett Kelly, California, 2016.
2 David Fine, Los Angeles in Fiction (Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 1984), p. 2. Also, Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 2000).
3 Fine, p. 11.
4 For specific references to nomadic subjectivity and transnationalism, see Olga Campofreda, Francesco Chianese, ‘Where Does Italian Youth Go To? Portraying the Nomadic Spirit of a Transnational Coming of Age’, in this volume. For a definition of the Italian diaspora, see Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (London, UCLA University Press, 2000).
5 John Fante, Ask the Dust (New York: Ecco, 2006 [1939]); Andrea De Carlo, Treno di panna (Turin: Einaudi, 1982); and Chiara Barzini, Things that Happened before the Earthquake (New York: Doubleday, 2017), co-translated with Francesco Pacifico into Italian as Terremoto (Milan: Mondadori, 2018).
6 Michael Sorkin, ‘Explaining Los Angeles’, in California Counterpoint: New West Coast Architecture 1982 (San Francisco Art Institute, 1982), p. 8.
7 David L. Ulin, ‘Introduction’, in Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (New York: The Library of America, 2002), p. xiii.
8 Ulin, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii.
9 Fine, p. 31.
10 See Mark Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
11 Ullin, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii.
12 Mike Devis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London, New York: Verso, 2006), p. 16.
13 Fine,
14 Devis, p. 17.
15 See Peter Bondanella, Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005).
16 Ulin, ‘Introduction’, p. xv.
17 Morrow Mayo, Los Angeles (New York: Knopf, 1933), p. 319.
18 Devis, p. 19.
19 Devis, p. 20.
20 Charles Bukowski, ‘Introduction’, in John Fante, Ask the Dust (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Harper Perennial, 2006), pp. 5–7.
21 Ulin, Writing Los Angeles, p. 218.
22 For an investigation of the circulation of Fante’s works in Italy questioning if Fante’s writing was a passport for (Italian) Americans to Italy or for Italians to America, see Teresa Fiore, ‘The Road to Italy and the United States: La creazione e diffusione delle opere di John Fante’, Quaderni del ‘900, 6 (2006). In conversation with Fiore, Stephen Cooper maintained: ‘He is like the rich emigrant who goes back to his Italian village: his literary reception in the country of his ancestors reads to me like the parable of the returned emigrant’. Teresa Fiore, ‘From Family to Institutional Memory: John Fante’s Archive (A Conversation with Fante’s Biographer Stephen Cooper)’, Italian Americana, 31.1 (2013), 17–23 (p. 18).
23 See Emma Bond, ‘Towards a Trans-national Turn in Italian Studies?’, Italian Studies, 69.3 (2014), 415–424; Charles Burdett, ‘Moving from a National to a Transnational Curriculum, Languages, Society & Policy, 2018; Clodagh Brook and Giuliana Pieri, ‘Italianistica in Gran Bretagna: tra Interdisciplinarità e Tradizione’, La Rassegna della Letteratura Italiana, 1.2 (2016), 207–16.
24 John Fante: A Critical Gathering, ed. by Stephen Cooper and David Fine (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999).
25 Alessandro Baricco, ‘Introduzione’, in John Fante, Chiedi alla polvere, trans. Mariagiulia Castagnone (Turin, Einaudi, 2004), pp. 3–5.
26 De Carlo.
27 See Laura Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra, ‘Introduction: Real Italians, New Immigrants’, in New Italian Migrations to the United States, Vol. 1 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017), pp. 1–32.
28 Francesco Chianese, ‘Italian items in domestic spaces. Representing Italianness through objects in the fiction of Helen Barolini and Chiara Barzini’, Translation and Interpreting Studies 17.1 (2022), 134–53.
29 Fante’s and De Carlo’s experiences of Los Angeles have been analysed comparatively in Silvia La Regina, ‘Giovanni e Arturo: Stranieri a L.A. Una lettura di John Fante e Andrea de Carlo’, Revista de Italianistica, 10–11 (2005), 91–106. My argument resonates with some of the points raised by the author.
30 Fante, p. 11.
31 Fante, p. 11.
32 Fante, p. 13.
33 Fante, p. 165.
34 Elio Vittorini, Conversation in Sicily, trans. Alane Serlierno Mason (New York: New Direction, 1949).
35 De Carlo, p. 5.
36 De Carlo, p. 5.
37 De Carlo, p. 199.
38 De Carlo, p. 199.
39 Barzini, p. 4.
40 Barzini, p. 11.
41 Barzini, p. 304.
42 Barzini, p. 6
43 See Elisa Bordin, Un’etnicità complessa: Negoziazioni identitarie nelle opere di John Fante (Napoli: La Scuola di Pitagora, 2019).
44 Choate.
45 See Fred L. Gardaphé, ‘John Fante’s American fantasia’, in John Fante: A Critical Gathering.
46 Fante, p. 11. For the definition of ‘Italian signs’, see Fred L. Gardaphé, Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996).
47 Fante, p. 24.
48 Fante, p. 48.
49 Ibid., p. 61.
50 Ibid., p. 62.
51 See Fred Gardaphé, Frome Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities (New York: Routledge 2006).
52 Fante, p. 115.
53 De Carlo, p. 64.
54 Ibid., p. 125.
55 Ibid., p. 146.
56 Ruberto and Sciorra.
57 See Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
58 The argument draws from many sources related to Lacanian theory, including Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London, New York: Verso, 1992). For further reference, see Francesco Chianese, ‘Sicily as a Space of Resistance Against Consumerism in Pasolini’s Teorema and Coppola’s The Godfather’, in Sicily on Screen: Essays on the Representation of the Island and Its Culture, ed. by Giovanna Sumerfield (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2020), pp. 13–36.