This panel investigates Italian American transnational and transgenerational depictions of memory and ethnic identity through visual culture. Our goal is to invite scholars to reflect on diverse media and forms of representation, drawing attention to artists, authors, and performers who used visual components to narrate their hybrid identities and relationships to trauma, diaspora, and postmemory. Names like Fasanella, B. Amore, DiSalvo, Stella, and Scanga, come to mind, as artists who gave form to visual tropes of memory narrating their experience as first and second-generation Italian Americans.

In her foundational book, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch demonstrates how photography serves as an interpretative frame to connect collective legacy to the personal experience. This panel aims to start from similar premises, focusing on how visual representation and re-interpretation play a pivotal role in postmemory and generational trauma, shifting the critical lens from Holocaust studies to the Italian American migration. Italian American cultural historians and folklorists have investigated how Italian Americans have used cultural expressions to assert their identity, resist marginalization, and create community. A notable example is New Italian Migrations to the United States Vol. 2: Art and Culture Since 1945 by Joseph Sciorra and Laura Ruberto, which emphasizes the adaptation of cultural forms in the public sphere as revitalizations of older practices and means of negotiating trans-national identities. Combined with the findings of oral historian Luisa Del Giudice in works such as Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans it is apparent how Italian diasporic artistic representations (and oral history) convert memory from a metaphorical archive into a public repository and a sharing space for culture.

Presentations in this panel address different forms of arts, namely painting, book illustrations, and dance, to provide a wide range of examples that deal with visual culture and hybrid identity. Dr. Colombari discusses Joseph Stella’s contribution to denouncing social inequalities and the miserable working conditions of Italian American communities by exploring a corpus of journal illustrations ranging from 1905 to 1908. She argues that, by engaging with worker-conscious themes, Stella humanized Italian Americans and challenged the conventions that frequently downgraded them to well-worn stereotypes. Dr. Diraviam examines how children’s book author and illustrator, Tomie dePaola, reveals an expression of his Italian transnational identity viewed from an idealized perspective of the second generation born in the United States (specifically in the Strega Nona series). She highlights how his artwork, by using colors and motifs that recall Renaissance art, establishes a record of favorable and romanticized memories. The resulting folktales represent a contemporary medium to convey timeless lessons historically disseminated through oral tradition and ecclesiastical paintings. Ms. Kim examines the impact of the transatlantic movements and artistic performances of the Italian-born dancer, Simone Forti. She emphasizes how Forti mentally revisits the space and visual trope of the zoo (reminiscent of her childhood in Italy) and transforms a memory of escape into a pivotal component of her artistic mobility.

Within the framework of Italian American studies, the contributions of this panel are very much needed considering that, whereas there are several major publications exploring Italian American imagery in films, the field of Italian American visual arts has not received much critical attention from scholars. For this reason, this panel serves as the starting point for a proposal for an edited volume on this subject (tentatively published by Fordham University Press) with the intent to fill this significant gap in the scholarship.