The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging

The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging PDF Author: Kym Ragusa
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393609553
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A memoir of astonishing delicacy and strength about race and physical beauty. Kym Ragusa's stunningly beautiful, brilliant black mother constantly turned heads as she strolled the streets of West Harlem. Ragusa's working-class white father, who grew up only a few streets (and an entire world) away in Italian East Harlem, had never seen anyone like her. At home their families despaired at the match, while in the streets the couple faced taunting threats from a city still racially divided—but they were mesmerized by the differences between them. From their volatile, short-lived pairing came a sensitive child with a filmmaker's observant eye. Her two powerful grandmothers gave her the love and stability to grow into her own skin. Eventually, their shared care for their granddaughter forced them to overcome their prejudices. Rent parties and religious feste, baked yams and baked ziti—Ragusa's sensuous memories are a reader's delight, as they bring to life the joy, pain, and inexhaustible richness of a racially and culturally mixed heritage. A Finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.

The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging

The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging PDF Author: Kym Ragusa
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393609553
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
A memoir of astonishing delicacy and strength about race and physical beauty. Kym Ragusa's stunningly beautiful, brilliant black mother constantly turned heads as she strolled the streets of West Harlem. Ragusa's working-class white father, who grew up only a few streets (and an entire world) away in Italian East Harlem, had never seen anyone like her. At home their families despaired at the match, while in the streets the couple faced taunting threats from a city still racially divided—but they were mesmerized by the differences between them. From their volatile, short-lived pairing came a sensitive child with a filmmaker's observant eye. Her two powerful grandmothers gave her the love and stability to grow into her own skin. Eventually, their shared care for their granddaughter forced them to overcome their prejudices. Rent parties and religious feste, baked yams and baked ziti—Ragusa's sensuous memories are a reader's delight, as they bring to life the joy, pain, and inexhaustible richness of a racially and culturally mixed heritage. A Finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.

Pre-Occupied Spaces

Pre-Occupied Spaces PDF Author: Teresa Fiore
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823274349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Runner Up Winner of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize - Established Scholars, Cultural Studies Category Winner of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize (20th & 21st Centuries) Honorable Mention for the Howard R. Marraro Prize By linking Italy’s long history of emigration to all continents in the world, contemporary transnational migrations directed toward it, as well as the country’s colonial legacies, Fiore’s book poses Italy as a unique laboratory to rethink national belonging at large in our era of massive demographic mobility. Through an interdisciplinary cultural approach, the book finds traces of globalization in a past that may hold interesting lessons about inclusiveness for the present. Fiore rethinks Italy’s formation and development on a transnational map through cultural analysis of travel, living, and work spaces as depicted in literary, filmic, and musical texts. By demonstrating how immigration in Italy today is preoccupied by its past emigration and colonialism, the book stresses commonalities and dispels preoccupations.

Memories of Belonging: Descendants of Italian Migrants to the United States, 1884-Present

Memories of Belonging: Descendants of Italian Migrants to the United States, 1884-Present PDF Author: Christa Wirth
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004284575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Memories of Belonging is a three-generation oral-history study of the offspring of southern Italians who migrated to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1913.

The Palgrave Handbook of Transnational Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century

The Palgrave Handbook of Transnational Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Claire Emilie Martin
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031404947
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 796

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Book Description


Interrupted Narratives and Intersectional Representations in Italian Postcolonial Literature

Interrupted Narratives and Intersectional Representations in Italian Postcolonial Literature PDF Author: Caterina Romeo
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031100433
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book argues for the importance of adopting a postcolonial perspective in analysing contemporary Italian culture and literature. Originally published in Italian in 2018 as Riscrivere la nazione: La letteratura italiana postcoloniale, this new English translation brings to light the connections between the present, the colonial past and the great historical waves of international and intranational migration. By doing so, the book shows how a sense of Italian national identity emerged, at least in part, as the result of different migrations and why there is such a strong resistance in Italy to extending the privilege of italianità, or Italianness, to those who have arrived on Italian soil in recent years. Exploring over 100 texts written by migrant and second-generation writers, the book takes an intersectional approach to understanding gender and race in Italian identity. It connects these literary and cultural contexts to the Italian colonial past, while also looking outwards to a more diffuse postcolonial condition in Europe.

Equivocal Subjects

Equivocal Subjects PDF Author: Shelleen Greene
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1472535219
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Analysing the depiction of African Italian mixed-race subjects from the historical epics of the Italian silent "golden" era to the contemporary period, Equivocal Subjects engages the history of Italian nationalism and colonialism through theories of subject formation, ideologies of race, and postcolonial theory. Greene's approach also provides a novel interpretation of recent developments surrounding Italy's status as a major passage for immigrants seeking to enter the European Union. This book provides an original theoretical approach to the Italian cinema that speaks to the nation's current political and social climate.

A History of African American Autobiography

A History of African American Autobiography PDF Author: Joycelyn Moody
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108875661
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 724

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Book Description
This History explores innovations in African American autobiography since its inception, examining the literary and cultural history of Black self-representation amid life writing studies. By analyzing the different forms of autobiography, including pictorial and personal essays, editorials, oral histories, testimonials, diaries, personal and open letters, and even poetry performance media of autobiographies, this book extends the definition of African American autobiography, revealing how people of African descent have created and defined the Black self in diverse print cultures and literary genres since their arrival in the Americas. It illustrates ways African Americans use life writing and autobiography to address personal and collective Black experiences of identity, family, memory, fulfillment, racism and white supremacy. Individual chapters examine scrapbooks as a source of self-documentation, African American autobiography for children, readings of African American persona poems, mixed-race life writing after the Civil Rights Movement, and autobiographies by African American LGBTQ writers.

Personal Effects

Personal Effects PDF Author: Nancy Caronia
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823262286
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Celebrating one of the most important Italian American female authors of our time, Personal Effects offers a lucid view of Louise DeSalvo as a writer who has produced a vast and provocative body of memoir writing, a scholar who has enriched our understanding of Virginia Woolf, and a teacher who has transformed countless lives. More than an anthology, Personal Effects represents an author case study and an example for modern Italian American interdisciplinary scholarship. Personal Effects examines DeSalvo’s memoirs as works that push the boundaries of the most controversial genre of the past few decades. In these works, the author fearlessly explores issues such as immigration, domesticity, war, adultery, illness, mental health, sexuality, the environment, and trauma through the lens of gender, ethnic, and working-class identity. Alongside her groundbreaking scholarship, DeSalvo’s memoirs attest to the power and influence of this feminist Italian American writer.

The Souls of Mixed Folk

The Souls of Mixed Folk PDF Author: Michele Elam
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804756309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
The Souls of Mixed Folk examines representations of mixed race in literature and the arts that redefine new millennial aesthetics and politics. Focusing on black-white mixes, Elam analyzes expressive works—novels, drama, graphic narrative, late-night television, art installations—as artistic rejoinders to the perception that post-Civil Rights politics are bereft and post-Black art is apolitical. Reorienting attention to the cultural invention of mixed race from the social sciences to the humanities, Elam considers the creative work of Lezley Saar, Aaron McGruder, Nate Creekmore, Danzy Senna, Colson Whitehead, Emily Raboteau, Carl Hancock Rux, and Dave Chappelle. All these writers and artists address mixed race as both an aesthetic challenge and a social concern, and together, they gesture toward a poetics of social justice for the "mulatto millennium." The Souls of Mixed Folk seeks a middle way between competing hagiographic and apocalyptic impulses in mixed race scholarship, between those who proselytize mixed race as the great hallelujah to the "race problem" and those who can only hear the alarmist bells of civil rights destruction. Both approaches can obscure some of the more critically astute engagements with new millennial iterations of mixed race by the multi-generic cohort of contemporary writers, artists, and performers discussed in this book. The Souls of Mixed Folk offers case studies of their creative work in an effort to expand the contemporary idiom about mixed race in the so-called post-race moment, asking how might new millennial expressive forms suggest an aesthetics of mixed race? And how might such an aesthetics productively reimagine the relations between race, art, and social equity in the twenty-first century?

Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives

Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives PDF Author: Marie Orton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 168393315X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives brings together creative literary works and scholarly articles. Both address the changes and challenges to identity formation in an Italy marked by the migrations, populism, nationalism, and xenophobia, and analyze diversity and the affirmation of belonging.