English: BlackItalian

Exploration of topics in theme and genre. May be repeated for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years. Credit not awarded for both ENGL 5100 and ENGL 3100. Prerequisite: Graduate student.

PENDING co-location with ENGL 3100 OL1

Blacks and Italians have a long and complex history of entanglement, emulation, suspicion, and conflict. We see it in early twentieth century New Orleans, where immigrant Sicilians, Afro-Creoles, and slavery-descended African Americans reshaped the so-called French Quarter through the advent of jazz and the forging of an entertainment sector that set the American standard for festivity and conviviality – this, in the city that spawned the legalization of Jim Crow segregation and enforced a strict color line in Italian-owned clubs on Bourbon Street. We see it in late twentieth century New York City, where neighborhood tribal territoriality exploded into street-level racial violence even as disco and hip-hop generated overlapping body styling, swaggering attitude, and spicy vernacular language (“fughettaboutit,” “Wassup?”). “Black” and “Italian,” however, need not refer only to points of connection between African Americans and Italian Americans. By introducing the term “BlackItalian,” we also consider racialized differences within Italy, Italians, and Italian Americans themselves. Just as the Mediterranean Sea limns the fluid space between Europe and Africa -- and large-scale African immigration decisively transforms contemporary Italy -- so Italian Americans transit across U.S. ethnoracial zones of white, near-white, and dark (“the hottest of the white ethnics,” Pellegrino D’Acierno asserts, “white but temperamentally and erotically dark”). This course will examine discourses of race, place, and belonging while conducting micro-level investigations of Black/Italian cultural representations and expressive forms. These include the work of jazz musician/entertainers Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima; the Rat Pack, Eddie Murphy, and other comedy acts; doo wop groups Dion and the Belmonts and Johnny Meastro and the Crests; blue-eyed soul icons The Rascals; roots musicians Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi; Afro-Italian rappers Tommy Kuti and Amir Isso; film artists Spike Lee, John Turturro, and Shaka King; writers Kym Ragusa, James Baldwin, Anthony Valerio, and Nicholas Montemarano. And more. Key to this inquiry is the concept of the contact zone, a space of cross-cultural encounter, affiliation, and disaffiliation. Sometimes material, sometimes metaphorical, the contact zone is a space of friction and intimacy, collision and collaboration, enmity and amity. We will examine this space using the tools of cultural studies and critical race and ethnic studies, engaging literature, the arts, and everyday life as sites of struggle inflected by differences of power, value, and esteem.

Through and careful reading and analysis; effective strategic research; graduate-level academic writing.

Group podcasts: 15% Weekly short essays: 15% Critical culture theory analysis: 15% Paper proposal: 10% Annotated bibliography (at least 10 entries): 10% Research paper (15-20 pages): 35%