“The objective of our book review
is to bring to the readers’ attention a largely unexplored area of research
that may offer new insights to scholars and students of modern Italian Studies,
both in the United States and Italy. Although many scholars have examined in
depth the representation of Italian emigration to the United States in
literature, cinema and television, there is still much to be discovered
concerning the Italian presence in the region of Rio de la Plata and the traces
that it left in the collective imagination of both Argentina and Italy. Between 1871 and 1910 about 3.4 million
individuals migrated to Argentina, 55 per cent of those being from Italy.
Several notable historians have investigated the history of Italian migration
to Argentina, including Samuel Baily, Emilio Franzina and Fernando J. Devoto,
whose encyclopedic study still awaits an English translation. Fewer scholars,
however, focused on the literary representations of Italians in Argentina. The
most noteworthy literary scholar who studied this phenomenon is Vanni Blengino,
whose significant collection of essays, titled La Babele nella ‘Pampa’.
L’emigrante italiano nell’immaginario argentino, was published in 2005.
Bravo Herrera’s volume is much broader in scope, thus representing an essential
point of reference for anyone wishing to study Italian emigration in the region
from the mid-XIX century to the present.
As Romano Luperini writes in the preface to Bravo Herrera’s book, her work
‘plugs a gap and fills a silence’ (p.21), and does so in a very eloquent way,
by looking at an extremely vast and multi-faceted body of work, ranging from
autobiographies, poems, popular songs, and sociological essays written from the
mid-1860s to the early twenty-first century. Some of the authors discussed are
well-known to scholars of Italian literature, such as Edmondo De Amicis,
Giovanni Pascoli and Ippolito Nievo, but many others were either forgotten or
ignored by Italian critics. The historical reasons for the lack of attention
toward emigration are well-known. During the period of Italian mass migration,
most bourgeois intellectuals either concealed or simply ignored the phenomenon,
as Antonio Gramsci commented in a famous passage of his Prison Notebooks, cited
by Bravo Herrera (p.44).
Another important feature that distinguishes the author’s contribution from
other studies is the theoretical framework that informs her readings, where
literary texts are considered, following Mikhail Bakhtin’s suggestion, as a
‘secondary discursive genre, constructed with the social “rumor” in a plurality
of voices that determine its plurilinguism’ (p.35). Thus, the texts analysed in
the volume are seen within a broader socio-political context, following the
lead of Edmond Cros’ Socio-criticism and Göran Therborn’s cultural theory.”
Pagano, Tullio - Hannah Rich, Huellas y recorridos de una utopía. La emigración italiana en la
Argentina en Journal of Modern Italian
Studies, 24:5, 2019, pp. 764-767. [ISSN 1354571X]. DOI:
10.1080/1354571X.2019.1681712. Web:
https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2019.1681712
Reseña disponible online: Journal of Modern Italian Studies
