(Not) Fighting “Flesh of Our Flesh”: Italian American Mobilization Discourse in the Second World War

Abstract Italian Americans faced a dilemma with the American intervention in the Second World War – how could they fight against the ancestral homeland and the “flesh of their flesh”? The leaders of the movement to remove the classification of non-naturalized Italians as alien enemies sought to reconcile this conflict, and demonstrate the collective and singular loyalty of their fellow ethnics to the United States by constructing a new Italian American worldview. This article provides a study of the reworking of the Italian barbarian-invasion narrative by the principal leader of the reclassification movement, Luigi Rocco Antonini, during the Second World War and the subsequent inclusion of this new variant in the framing of the American policy to continue mobilizing the Italian ethnic bloc in the United States.