Is America dead? asked Ishmael Reed, point- edly upbraiding the separatism of those who declared it killed in action in the culture wars or battles of identity politics. Reed sees the new world of Italian American studies as a major part of what he calls a European American ethnic Renaissance (xx). He may well be right. The explosion of interest in Italian Ameri- cana over the past decade comes from its concern not only for Italianita `, but also for ways of mediating between the divisive separatism that has shadowed the large achievements of ethnic studies and a universalism based on the erasure of differences. How best to negotiate that distance? Road maps have been hard to find. Approaches to ethnic literature have typically displayed road signs written in lexicons of opposition. Conflicts between marginal and mainstream culture, tradition-bound parents and their more assimilated children, and among ethnic groups have made tropes of distance and competitive rage commonplace in ethnic art. Jurgen Habermas has lamented that the claims of each group have seemed all the more painful the more the tenden- cies to self-assertion take on a fundamentalist and separatist character (118). Writing in Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995), Walter Benn Michaels explains why seemed impossible to bypass: There are no anti-essentialist ac- counts of identity. The reason for is that the essentialism inheres not in the description of the identity, but in the attempt to derive the practices from the identity—we do because we are this (181).
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Mar 1, 2001
Mark Pietralunga 
