Pockets of PA: The Dismantling of Places and Spaces

Calabretta-Sajder, Ryan; Calabretta-Sajder, Ryan

Based on our hugely successful “City Lights at 70: 1953-2023” session in San Francisco, the Italian American Studies Association allied organization and the Italian American LLC feature a panel on Pennsylvania and surrounding areas, such as Ohio, grounded in Italian American Studies. This panel largely considers the concept of “border,” i.e. place, space, and time, as locations and generators of meaning or lack thereof. How have once important Italian American neighborhoods and places become shells of their former existence? In 2010, the Philadelphia area claimed the second-largest Italian American population in the US (142,000 residents and 3,100 Italian migrants). The panelists want to engage with Philadelphia and the local area from a critical lens.

The three panelists of this session take different approaches to validating Philadelphia and the surrounding area as central to the places and spaces of iconic Italian-American films and literature. In “Joseph Bathanti’s East Liberty: The Literary Space of Little Italy,” Joseph Tumolo analyzes Joseph Bathanti’s semiautobiographical novel, East Liberty (2001), following the childhood and adolescence of the narrator-protagonist, Italian-American Bobby Renzo, in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood during the 1960s. Tumolo argues that Bathanti’s East Liberty is a kind of allegory for all Little Italies, or perhaps all urban ethnic neighborhoods. In the twenty-first century, as Bathanti’s novel makes clear, Little Italy is not so much a physical place, but rather a dreamscape, a memory, and ultimately an eminently literary place. In “Italian American Borderlands: W PA and NE Ohio as Narrative Places and Spaces,” Anthony Mitzel considers how class and race empower, or more often than not, paralyze positive economic growth in ethnic neighborhoods. Through studying the role of mafia and unions in the local areas of Western Pennsylvania and Northeastern Ohio, Mitzel argues that class and capitalism has always blocked Italian Americans from truly joining the Upper Middle Class. In “Mise En Scène: Philadelphia in the Rocky (1976-2006) and Creed (2015-23) Series,” Alan J Gravano examines the neighborhoods of Philadelphia as character in both series. Through exploring concepts of “diasporic borders,” race, and gender, Gravano illustrates how the ever-evolving Little Italies must face their own, racist, white-privledged histories.

Although some critical attention has been provided to Rocky and Creed, mostly from cinema studies, much less has been given to them from cultural studies or gender readings. Joseph Bathanti’s literature is understudied and few Humanities scholars have dedicated critical space to consider place and space in Western PA and Northeastern Ohio. For this reason, we argue that this panel offers newfound research avenues connected directly to the area of the conference.

Taken together, this wide-ranging collection of presentations offers many angles from which to appreciate the professional, imaginative, and linguistic achievements of Italian American visionaries.

Each presenter will have 20 minutes. During the remaining 15 minutes, the presider (who) will facilitate the discussion. All presenters are asked to prepare a PowerPoint presentation to enhance the visual experience of their talks.

734 Pockets of PA: The Dismantling of Places and Spaces: Calls for Papers