Ferlinghetti Film in NYC!

(Ferlinghetti’s  poem, Totalitarian Democracy, appears in our anthology Avanti Popolo: Italian-American Writers Sail Beyond Columbus.)

“DOCUMENTED ITALIANS”

FILM & VIDEO SERIES

Tuesday, April 19, 2011, 6 pm Ferlinghetti (2009), 82 min.

Christopher Felver, dir.

John D. Calandra Italian American Institute

25 West 43rd Street, 17th floor

New York, New York 10036

(Between 5^th and 6^th Avenues)

The bestselling poet in modern literature, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has also been a catalyst for numerous literary careers and an influential counterculture figure. In 1953, he founded San Francisco’s City Lights Booksellers with Peter Martin and, two years later, launched the store’s publishing wing. A First Amendment activist, Ferlinghetti’s infamous censorship trial for his publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1956 launched the social rebellion of the Beats into national consciousness. In this documentary, director Christopher Felver’s extensive interviews with Ferlinghetti, together with archival photographs, historical footage, and appearances by Billy Collins, Allen Ginsberg, Dennis Hopper, and many others, explore Ferlinghetti’s work as a writer, artist, publisher, and civil libertarian.

Post-screening discussion with the director led by poet Gil Fagiani.

8th Annual Avanti Popolo: Italian Americans Sail Beyond Columbus

Monday October 11th, 2010 7pm//City Lights Books//261 “Columbus”//SF CA

The Italian-American Political Solidarity Club’s annual fete of people of Italian dissent turns eight. Jennifer Guglielmo, editor of Are Italians White: How Race is Made in America discusses her new book Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City 1880-1945. In a time of anti-immigrant reaction, the IAPSC  proposes that Italian-Americans break from the “Columbus Myth” of conquest and embrace traditions in our histories rooted in human solidarity. Guglielmo will be joined in conversation by Berkeley City College professor Laura Ruberto, author of Gramsci, Migration and the Representation of Women’s Work and translator of Such is Life/Ma la vita è fatta cosi and Tommi Avicolli Mecca, editor of    Smash the Church,Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation.Co-hosted by Cameron Mc Henry and James Tracy , co-editors ofAvanti Popolo: Italian-American Writers Sail Beyond Columbus.

Book Review: Fagiani’s Blanquito in El Barrio

Gil Fagiani’s “A Blanquito in El Barrio” bursts past easy first impressions and the confines of its own subjects. It complicates issues of a white visitor to a barrio of color and a temporary stay in a rough neighborhood through powerful, unflinching poetry of addiction and redemption.

The book works on several levels. Fagiani is the master of the brief poem—wrapping layers of meaning and imagery into scarce lines as in “Junkie’s Alarm Clock” and “Hands On”. This economy serves him in the longer poems as well—each line bursts with visual imagery bringing characters and neighborhood blocks back to vivid life. There’s also never any question that Fagiani isn’t simply observing addiction—but speaks from a place of experience.

The poems in Blanquito are sharp and compassionate portraits of a complex neighborhood–Harlem during the late sixties. These poems suggest some of the rage and alienation that would later find political voice in the decade’s upheaval. The stories Fagiani has to tell about his stay in El Barrio are rarely uplifting. Yet the stark manner in which he speaks of addiction, infidelity and violence never patronizes or descends into pat political pronouncements.

There are some who may question Fagiani’s license to speak of a El Barrio. Italian-Americans were largely on an exodus from Harlem by the time he arrived. Poems such as the “Litany of Saint Vito” –exaulting Vito Marcantonio, the staunchly anti-racist radical Congressman suggest a yearning for an Italian-American identity that didn’t run for the suburbs. In politics, contradictions are a thing to be ironed out until the crease is gone from the fabric. In this book, these contradictions provide a fantastic read and hard-earned insight into one of America’s most fabled and misunderstood neighborhoods.

-James Tracy

What the World Needs Now…

We could sure use some more Italian-Irish against racist bullshit! (Picture of Patrick Flanagan letting the Minutemen know how he felt when they visited our fine city last year.) Kind readers: Beyond Columbus has been dormant as of late–but keep your eyes on this space. In April, we’ll be sending a friendly challenge to our paisans over at the Order Of the Sons of Italy to debate the Columbus legacy and also announce some exciting events on both coasts. Also reviews of new books by Avanti Popolo contributors Gil Fagiani and Maria Lisella.

New Jennifer Guglielmo Book Set For May Release

Living the Revolution

Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945

By Jennifer Guglielmo

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Italians were the largest group of immigrants to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, and hundreds of thousands led and participated in some of the period’s most volatile labor strikes. Yet until now, Italian women’s political activism and cultures of resistance have been largely invisible. In Living the Revolution, Jennifer Guglielmo brings to life the Italian working-class women who helped shape the vibrant, transnational, radical political culture that expanded into the emerging industrial union movement.

Guglielmo imaginatively documents the activism of two generations of New York and New Jersey women who worked in the needle and textile trades. She explores the complex and distinctive ways immigrant women and their American-born daughters drew on Italian traditions of protest to form new urban female networks of everyday resistance and political activism. And she shows how their commitment to revolutionary and transnational social movements diminished as they became white working-class Americans. The rise of fascism, the Red Scare, and the deprivations of the Great Depression led many to embrace nationalism and racism, ironically to try to meet the same desires for economic justice and dignity that had inspired their enthusiasm for anarchism, socialism, and communism.

About the Author

Jennifer Gugliemo is assistant professor of history at Smith College. She is coeditor of Are Italians White?: How Race Is Made in America.

Reviews

“Here is the new paradigm in the history of gender and immigration. Guglielmo’s careful attention to transnational capitalism and diaspora as well as to Italians’ shifting political formations around race make this book as innovative and inspiring as the voices of Italian women anarchists she so vividly documents. A must-read!”
–Nan Enstad, University of Wisconsin, Madison



Columbus Controversy

In response to Dr. Marsella’s essay, the Order of the Sons of Italy in America issued a brief rebuttal and circulated this pamphlet: Columbus: Myths and Facts.  In OSIA’s worldview Columbus is getting just getting bad rap by people who are out to push their own political agendas by playing fast and loose with history.

Dr. Marsella responds:

October 15, 2009

Dear Dona:

I take exception to your defense of Columbus Day precisely because I
am of Italian ancestry.  I found the report you submitted to justify
a Columbus Day holiday to be less than “objective” and factual as
you contend. Indeed, it was characterized by some truths, some half-
truths, and some serious misrepresentations.

It is precisely because I am of Italian ancestry that I reject a
national holiday that honors the name of Columbus. I believe Columbus
was a bold, courageous, and skilled navigator, but the consequences
of his arrival and travels among the Caribbean Islands proved
destructive and genocidal for the indigenous people of these lands
and for many others in the following centuries.  There can be no
justification — either then or now — for what occurred.

Diversity Day, Si! Columbus Day, No!

Diversity Day, Si!  Columbus Day, No!

Rethinking Columbus Day in a Global Era

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D.

ColumbusDay (October 11, 2009) is a recognized national holiday instituted years ago by Congress as a celebration of our nation’s founders and origins. For Italian-Americans, in particular, there is a strong sense of pride in Christopher Columbus’ bold and courageous journey to sail beyond the horizon and to discover a new route to India.  Interestingly, however, Christopher Columbus actually was raised in Portugal, and spent much of his time in Spain, and he did not find what he was looking for when he stumbled across the Caribbean Islands in 1492. But, he did end up causing a lot of problems that continue today. Nevertheless, many Italian-American cultural organizations and communities use the day as a celebration of Italian culture — festivals, parades and processions, food vendors, music, and a flying of the green, white, and red Italian flag. Viva Cristoforo Columbo!   Every group needs heroes so they must be forgiven if they continue to use the day as a chance for merriment and pride, unwarranted as it may be.

An Italian American Against Columbus Day

NOTE: This article was published in today’s Providence Rhode Island Journal. Brown University canceled its’ Columbus celebrations soon thereafter. Conservative Italians staged protests. Tommi Avicolli Mecca points out that breaking with Columbus should be an act of pride for Italian-Americans. -IAPSC

By Tommi Avicolli Mecca

IT MIGHT BE SURPRISING to learn that I am an Italian/American against Columbus Day. I believe Brown University was right to rename its celebration.

I’m not a self-hating Italian. Quite the opposite. I couldn’t be more proud of my heritage. My family comes from Basilicata and Molise in southern Italy. They came as immigrants still do, to escape poverty and find work. I was born and raised in the working-class streets of South Philly in the ’50s and ’60s, when Italians were still not considered fully white. As a kid, I endured being called “dago” and “grease-ball.” I was told I had a Roman nose; “roams all over your face,” the kids would laugh.

Interview with Diane Di Prima

In October 2008, the legendary radical Italian-American poet Diane Di Prima was slated to return to the annual Avanti Popolo reading at City Lights Bookstore. Not quite recovered from a recent operation, she had to cancel. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, she was not only there in spirit, but we taped an interview over the phone. Now you can enjoy it as well.-James Tracy

People of Italian-American Dissent

Every October in San Francisco’s North Beach, nestled between the sonic booms of the Blue Angels, the Italian-American Political Solidarity Club stages the Avanti-Popolo: Sailing Beyond Columbus reading at the venerable City Lights Bookstore. Given the bookstore’s tradition of instigating and embracing dissent, the location is a fitting one. It is also the former location of the Italian language bookstore that served the community at the turn of the century.

The event celebrates the history most of us didn’t hear about in school: the accomplishments our labor organizers, free-speech advocates, feminists, sports heroes, actors and poets. What we won’t celebrate every October are lost sailors, stolen land, and the not-so little matter of genocide catalyzed by Columbus’ arrival in a world that was only “new” to those from the other side of the pond.

The Avanti readings stand in a tradition which include groundbreaking events in the 1990s organized by New York’s Italian-Americans for a Multi Cultural US, and the powerhouse San Francisco activist Tommi Avicolli-Mecca at the old Josie’s Juice and Cabaret in SF’s Castro District.

Why, 517 years after the arrival of Columbus is this important? On one hand, it is a simple matter of pride. When the history of our people on this continent is rich with those who acted from a vision of a world radically better than theirs. why laud Columbus, who wrote about how easy it would be to enslave the native population? More importantly, by sailing beyond Columbus worship, we also break with a mindset that justifies war and domination.  Potentially, this can alter how we react to today’s wars, occupation, immigration debates, and environmental disasters.