In the last three decades, Italian/American culture has at last experienced a veritable renaissance and has begun to be studied from diasporic, transnational, trans-lingual, and global perspectives by a growing number of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Working from an interdisciplinary standpoint, and taking as basis the latest developments in the field, the essays in this volume are meant as a contribution to the ongoing, collective effort at expanding and updating knowledge concerning Italian/American literature, cinema, and culture in their various articulations. They explore the effects that the texts' imaginary-often linked to the idea of space, mobility, and change-produces on our understanding of Italian/American culture. This knowledge can help construct a new narrative of Italian/American life, as well as provide a more complex understanding of American history and culture in a transnational context.
As the international conference Re-Mapping Italian America. Places, Cultures, Identities (Roma Tre University, 2016) has made clear, it is high time to reformulate the notions of place, culture, and identity in order to arrive at a more dynamic definition of these concepts. This re-consideration allows for new paradigms, flexible enough to make sense of the most significant changes in the field of contemporary Italian/American studies and suggestive of additional future perspectives in Italian/American criticism.