The Enkidu Summer Conference 2008: Storytelling, Memories and Identity Constructions

México City, 3 - 7 July, 2008

Italians’ Worldwide Scattering between Migration and Diaspora

Stefano Luconi

Department  of History

Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata

Italia

In the last few years a diaspora “explosion” has shaped migration studies. Against this backdrop, the resort to such an interpretative category has no longer been confined to describing peoples who experience forced relocation from their native places beyond state boundaries. The notion of diaspora has undergone a semantic as well as a conceptual stretching to include almost any kind of people’s relocation and scattering across their national borders. 

A single catastrophic event is no longer considered as a prerequisite of diasporas. Geographical dispersion, including separation beyond national frontiers, orientation toward an imagined or real homeland, and the preservation of a distinctive identity of the immigrant communities as opposed to the broader host societies are the core elements that describe “diasporas” in present-day scholarship. The magic spell of the diaspora paradigm has eventually fascinated studies on Italian migrations, too. An increasing number of scholars has turned to this term to refer nor only to the geographical dispersion of people from Italy throughout the world since 1876, when official statistics about the number of expatriates from this country began to be collected, but also to the resettlement of Italians beyond the Alps and across the Mediterranean in the decades or even the centuries that preceded such a mass outflow. 

After reviewing the current academic debate on the diaspora models in migration studies, this paper examines to what an extent this notion offers a viable category to aptly describe the exodus from the Italian peninsula. It concludes that such a concept can hardly be applied to the Italian case because migrations from Italy have had characteristics of their own that are at odds even with the most comprehensive redefinition of diaspora in current literature. 

The physical dispersal of Italians abroad was a continuous inflow and outflow of people – often the same individuals – across the country’s borders that did not occur in a relatively brief period of time under the pressure of irresistible “push factors.” Instead, Italians staggered their departures over a number of decades within carefully planned family strategies. In addition, great expectations – rather than painful events – marked their exodus. 

Voluntary departure under economic pressures rules out an Italian diaspora according the classic paradigm of traumatic dispersion. But the troubled relationship between the emigrants and their native country hardly lets the revised diasporic model be applied to the case of Italian expatriates either. Primarily a pursuit of economic opportunities abroad by people who felt rejected by their own native country and long retained subnational identities before assimilation within their host societies, the features of Italian global migrations are unable to stand out in scholarship within the framework of the unbound reformulations of the diaspora paradigm. 

Other terms can more aptly define the Italian exodus in order to stress both the peculiarities of this phenomenon and its worldwide spread as well as the emigrants’ individual or family agency and the circularity of an experience that was often shaped by repatriations and temporary sojourns rather than by a definitive physical separation from the homeland.

About Stefano Lucano

Stefano Luconi teaches U.S. history at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” and specializes in Italian immigration to the United States. His publications include La “diplomazia parallela”: Il regime fascista e la mobilitazione politica degli italo-americani (Milan: Angeli, 2000); From Paesani to White Ethnics. The Italian Experience in Philadelphia (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001); Little Italies e New Deal: La coalizione rooseveltiana e il voto italo-americano a Filadelfia e Pittsburgh (Milan: Angeli, 2002); L’ombra lunga del fascio: Canali di propaganda fascista per gli “italiani d’America” (Milan: M&B Publishing, 2004) (written with Guido Tintori); The Italian-American Vote in Providence, Rhode Island, 1916-1948 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004); La politica dello scandalo (Turin: L’Harmattan Italia, 2006); La faglia dell’antisemitismo: Italiani ed ebrei negli Stati Uniti, 1920-1941 (Viterbo: Sette Città, 2007).