Through the Periscope: Changing Culture, Italian America by Martino Marazzi (review)

Reviewed by: Through the Periscope: Changing Culture, Italian America by Martino Marazzi Antonio Salmeri Through the Periscope: Changing Culture, Italian America. By Martino Marazzi. (SUNY Series in Italian/American Culture) Albany: State University of New York Press. 2022. viii+199 pp. £80. ISBN 978–1–4384–8861–5. Martino Marazzi confronts the reader, as the title of his study suggests, with different stages and arrangements of perception by focusing on the nodes and End Page 274 interweavings of an Italian American cultural and literary landscape. The author himself describes the particular attraction of this transversal approach as 'bringing to focus the new through the old, and reframing the old through the unforeseeable outcomes of the new conditions' (p. 3). This spatio-temporal 'double presence' (p. 3) guides through a demanding reading of the 'hidden' (also aside from the academic canon) to unveil new perspectives of ambiguity and polyvalence of the Italian diasporic experience and cultural identity in 'its historical and present configuration' (p. 7). In the first chapter, 'A Hard Rome's A-Gonna Fall', Marazzi cleverly places Roman sonnets, Sicilian literary works, and American ballads in dialogue with each other. In this transnational frame he interlocks the transoceanic circularity of literary motifs with the process of the Italian Risorgimento and an Italian American 'meridionalismo' (p. 20), as well as with the imaginary formation of America as a 'New World' (p. 17) in the context of Italian emigration. 'European motifs', as he describes, 'reappear arranged and signified anew, recognizably or subliminally, in both cases poetically compensating for the social and ideological complexities littering the history of transatlantic relationships' (p. 30). In Chapter 2, 'Changing Culture', the author invites us to reconsider the interaction between the psychic and the sociohistorical in aesthetic terms. In the literature of European immigrants of the twentieth century, the city of New York has become a 'master-trope' of a transatlantic imaginary (p. 32). The city as a sign oscillates between cultural alienation and freedom in its aestheticization. 'New York literature provides evidence of the fact that its immigrant cultures . . . forge new identities in an unprecedented, new urban environment' (p. 34). As an organic figure, New York stands for manifold poetics, which Marazzi also addresses using the examples of painting (Martino Iasoni) and music (Enrico Caruso), moving with ease in a transmedial framework that revolves around the city-sign as a 'knot of affection' (p. 43). In 'Our brother Dante' (Chapter 3) he focuses on reappropriations of Dante in Italian America and devotes himself to a 'telltale paradox', since, after all, they are so obvious that they are quite simply not very much considered. 'Dante as a whole—his texts, his "figura", the aura of his authority—has had a long history in America' to such an extent that he has acquired a quasi-Italian American status and become the figure of a 'collective patrimony' (p. 45). Marazzi's readings of Garibaldi Lapolla (The Grand Gennaro, 1935), Pietro di Donato (Christ in Concrete, 1939), and Nick Tosche's novel In the Hand of Dante (2002) focus on the dimension of a Dantesque longue durée—the diachronic dimension of a profoundly symbolic journey of ascent and knowledge that is coloured by the diasporic experiences and cultural matrix of America. Marazzi repeatedly returns to the 'poet's centrality' as a blueprint, also, for 'a new, hard-won, unprecedented individualism' (p. 46). As a wanderer between worlds, Dante not only connects Italy and America, but through the reiterated process of fictional reimagination he becomes 'the possibly most authoritative . . . companion in that most real of all journeys' (p. 75). In the second part of his study, 'Transitional Modes of Italian American Letters' End Page 275 (Chapters 4–8), the author moves even more freely within the transnational array of Italian American cultural artefacts and modes of manifestation: readings of postcards, paintings, poems, and letters are complemented by more 'classical' interpretations of the literary œuvre of Garibaldi Mario Lapolla (Chapter 6) and Roberto Viscusi (Chapter 8). Marazzi demonstrates what an entangled reading of an intersected cultural history might look like and pleads for a rethinking of the scientific discourse. In 'I Am(s)' (Chapter 7) he calls for...