When Niccolo Machiavelli penned his masterpiece, The Prince, Italy was a land divided and besieged by many foreign forces. In his last chapter, “An Exhortation to free Italy from the Hands of the Barbarians,” he calls for new weapons and formations to be used in warding off intruders and to prepare for new leadership of Italy. In many ways, the current state of Italian/American culture is in similar straights. We need new tools and new alliances to bring a sense of unification to our culture so that we can ward off popular misconceptions of just what constitutes Italian American culture in today’s world.
The notion of “Noi, il Popolo,” was bypassed by immigrants of Italian descent in this country as they swiftly made their way into new identities as U.S. Americans with few manifestations of the prejudice and discrimination they faced along the way. In that process, few have considered and confronted the fact they have been colonized, some by choice, some by force, and others by sheer apathy. Italian Americans have been colonized in terms of race, they became White; linguistically, they abandoned ancestral languages, and through social class they chased the American Dream.
Where Italian Americans have been slow to organize as a cultural group is in the mainstream public institutions. The programs that might have taught Italian Americans the value of their own culture and subsequently fortified future generations, the public programs that would have challenged media-made impressions, were never created. A key figure in changing this trend is Dr. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Distinguished Professor of Italian and Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute
Since taking over the lead of the Calandra Institute, Dean Tamburri has worked tirelessly to raise the awareness of Italian Americans in higher education and the U.S. American society at large. To this end he had directed research and fostered scholarship and community programming that not only reflects what has come before, in terms of intellectual attempts to discuss Italian American culture, but also offers alternative ways of seeing and being Americans of Italian descent. His latest book is the result of the thinking and actions he’s developed over the past twenty years. Dr. Tamburri has done what we all need to do: learn how the past has created the present so that we can better face the challenges the future brings.
What you will find in these pages are observations and analyses of Italian American Organizations, who obsessed with handing out scholarships, pat each other on the back as they contribute to their own demise by helping kids go to college with little understanding of, and weak connections, to their culture.
You’ll also learn why we need to study today’s youth, to investigate their wants and needs, how best to engage, support and guide them, to prepare for the transference of power. To this end, we need to develop think tanks of intellectuals committed to move beyond social hegemony as they create educational programs that complicate interpretation, strengthen students’ abilities to teach themselves, and that enhance their abilities to criticize and refine expression of observations. Tamburri also shows the need for partnerships between the business and academic communities that aren’t afraid to put the money where the power will be.
Through this study, he helps us better know our place in this world of identity politics, so that when we think, we can act on knowledge more than sentiment, and when we act, we can create opportunities to make this world a better place for everyone.
Through thorough research, logical argumentation, and careful articulation, Tamburri creates a document that wisely speaks to the needs of all Americans and provides a blueprint of how we can build new ways toward peaceful coexistence of all, no matter your political persuasion. A Politics of [Self]Omission is must reading for all Italian Americans.
A Politics of [Self]Omission: The Italian/American Challenge in A Post-George Floyd Age
Roma: Aracne, 2022. ISBN: 979-12-218-02849.
