This panel speaks directly to the MLA's presidential theme of “emancipatory narratives” by interrogating what emancipation means when it is legible not as triumphant self-declaration but as a quiet, stubborn refusal: refusal of assimilation's terms, of respectability, of narrative uplift itself. Fante and Bukowski write from the underside of the American Dream, and their literary voices enact an embodied, and ambivalent form of emancipation. Their narrators do not transcend marginality so much as inhabit it, transforming social abjection into aesthetic authority. The panel also asks a critical question latent within the theme: who gets to authorize an emancipatory narrative, and by what mechanisms does an ethnic literary tradition emancipate itself from its own ethnic designation? Reading Italian American aesthetics as a mobile, transmissible formation rather than a fixed identity category opens space for rethinking how literary emancipation operates across ethnic, generic, and canonical boundaries. This has stakes in the current moment, when ethnic literary studies are actively reconsidering the relationship between identity, aesthetics, and literary value. Los Angeles grounds this inquiry in material and historical specificity. As a city built on racial hierarchization, economic precarity, and the ruthless commodification of dreams, Los Angeles has always demanded that its writers reckon with the distance between myth and lived experience. Fante and Bukowski answer that demand from a position of ambiguous whiteness, immigrant memory, and class dispossession. This combination makes their work a productive, underexamined site for thinking about how emancipatory impulses are shaped, constrained, and sometimes perverted by the conditions they seek to escape. For an MLA meeting held in Los Angeles, this panel offers a literary homecoming: a chance to read the city's own contested literary inheritance through the lens of the theme it has been asked to illuminate.

Anthony Dion Mitzel considers John Fante and Charles Bukowski as two of America’s most influential underground writers, both known for their depictions of poverty, struggle, and artistic ambition. Despite writing in different eras, their works share a thematic lineage that explores the hardships of the working class while using humor as a means of resilience and critique. Mitzel’s paper examines their connection, focusing on how humor shapes their portrayals of alienation, artistic frustration, and economic struggle, while showing how both writers use Los Angeles as a central backdrop for their narratives, portraying the city as both a land of opportunity and a site of disillusionment.

Alan J. Gravano reads John Fante’s Ask the Dust through Italian American theoretical frameworks, arguing that Los Angeles functions as a site where identity is performed, contested, and destabilized. Drawing on the work of Fred Gardaphé and Anthony Julian Tamburri, Gravano interprets Arturo Bandini’s oscillation between ethnic self and assimilated subject as spatially mediated. The novel constructs Los Angeles as a liminal, ambivalent force that both enables and forecloses belonging. Gravano posits Fante as presenting Italianità not as a resolved identity, but as an ongoing condition of tension and longing within the urban landscape.

Melissa Hiesmayr’s paper examines the relationship between John Fante and Charles Bukowski through Italianità as a mobile, unstable cultural form. Also, drawing on Fred Gardaphé and Anthony Julian Tamburri, it reconceptualizes ethnicity as aesthetic residue expressed through tone, voice, and narrative posture. By reading Fante and Bukowski together, the paper demonstrates how Italian American literary aesthetics circulate beyond ethnic boundaries and into broader American countercultural and cinematic representations of Los Angeles.

Lucas Amorim examines John Fante’s Dreams from Bunker Hill as a critique of Hollywood labor and Italian American identity under capitalism. Focusing on Arturo Bandini’s work as a screenwriter in 1930s Los Angeles, Amorim argues that the novel exposes the alienation of artistic production within the culture industry. Drawing on Fred Gardaphé and Stephen Cooper, alongside Theodor Adorno and Mike Davis, the paper considers Bandini’s fragmented subjectivity and ambivalent Italian American identity.

To conclude, this panel examines Italian American literary aesthetics and “emancipatory narratives” through John Fante and Charles Bukowski, treating emancipation as refusal rather than resolution. It responds to current scholarship in Italian American studies and humor studies by extending the work of Fred Gardaphé and Anthony Julian Tamburri, while incorporating critical theory, humor studies, and working-class and labor analysis to rethink identity as mobile, aesthetic, and spatially mediated. The session is organized to reassess how ethnic literary traditions exceed fixed identity categories and circulate across media and cultural forms. The panel will include four 12–15 minute papers followed by a 15-minute open discussion. Together, these perspectives offer methodological diversity and represent varied institutional, theoretical, and international voices.