For much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Italian Americans have occupied an uneasy position within U.S. racial, cultural, and national narratives—simultaneously marked as insiders and outsiders, assimilated and othered, white and not-quite-white. This call for papers invites scholars to revisit and re-theorize Italian American identity through the lens of Otherness, drawing on and expanding the concept of Italianità as articulated by Fred Gardaphé and Anthony Julian Tamburri.

Gardaphé and Tamburri define Italianità not as a fixed essence, but as a dynamic, historically contingent process shaped by migration, memory, language, class, region, gender, and cultural production. Italianità is thus not merely ethnic identity, but a mode of cultural expression and self-positioning forged in relation to dominant narratives of Americanness. Within this framework, Italian Americans emerge as a paradigmatic example of the “in-between”: racially malleable, culturally legible yet persistently marked, and frequently rendered as symbolic Others in literature, film, media, and public discourse.

This CFP seeks to extend that framework by situating Italian American studies more explicitly within Italian diaspora studies, recognizing Italian America as one node within a global network of Italian migrations to the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australia, and beyond. By placing Italian American experiences in dialogue with broader diasporic formations, we aim to complicate national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries while examining how Italianità is produced, contested, and reimagined across transnational contexts.

We welcome interdisciplinary submissions that explore Italian Americans and Italian diasporic subjects more broadly, as Others across historical periods and cultural forms. Topics may include, but are not limited to: 

• Theorizing Italianità, Otherness, and liminality
• Italian Americans and racial formation in the United States
• Comparative approaches to Italian diasporas (e.g., Italian Canadian, Latin American, Caribbean, African, or Australian contexts)
• Representations of Italian Americans as Others in literature, film, television, comics, or popular culture
• Language, code-switching, dialect, and linguistic marginalization
• Gender, sexuality, and queer Italian diasporic identities
• Labor, class, migration, and economic exclusion
• Religion, region, and Southern Italian difference
• Colonial, postcolonial, and Mediterranean frameworks
• Memory, trauma, and intergenerational transmission
• Italianità in contemporary debates on nationalism, whiteness, and belonging

By bringing Italian American studies into sustained conversation with Italian diaspora studies, this project seeks to challenge narrow ethnic frameworks and highlight Italianità as a flexible, contested, and globally resonant cultural practice. We invite contributions that rethink what it means to be “Italian American” by interrogating how Otherness operates, historically, aesthetically, and politically, across borders and generations.

Submission details:

Please submit an abstract of approximately 250-300 words, along with a 75-word bio, by March 20. This is a guaranteed Allied Organization Session.
Questions may be directed to Alan J. Gravano