Race and Italian American Writing: A Lecture by Robert Viscusi March 20, 2013

Professor Robert Viscusi, a professor of English at Brooklyn College, addresses race in Italian American writing. He examines Louisa Ermelino’s novel The Black Madonna, which uses the Southern Italian cult of the madonna nera as the context for a brilliant comedy that features a group of strong-minded women in Little Italy, and relates it to a number of other works, including Graziella Parati’s Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture, Alessandra Di Maio’s “Black Italia” and such classic whiteness studies as Rudolph Vecoli’s “Are Italians White?” and Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Roots Too.