The journal's name, Diasporic Italy, advocates a fresh rethinking of Italian American studies by broadening its investigative focus and posing a more complicated range of contexts. The title's semantic nucleus projects “Italy” above all in terms of successive waves of a people's scattering: demographic waves that blend with other exodus populations and gather in hundreds of urban counterworlds and undercommons across the Atlantic and around the world. Due to these instituting and ongoing migrations, distant and ever-changing “Italy” becomes, for all kinds of reasons, a resonance chamber for successive generations for whom Italy matters.As the new journal recognizes, the who in the for whom is richly protean, intersectional, and as never before, culturally volatile. Passage to and from Italy, along with mutable ways of performing one's identity and rearranging an unstable hierarchy of ethnic traits, confirms that Diasporic Italy is deeply involved in circum-Atlantic cultural politics, while diasporic authors and scholars continue to probe the boundaries of communication between versus representation within.In our fluid, crisis-ridden world, migrating multitudes have become the new normal, due to phenomena such as global warming, rising sea levels, drought, exhausted resources, poverty, tyranny, and pervasive racial and inter-ethnic conflicts—all of which affect migration to and from Italy in ways that eco-humanists are fruitfully comparing to other geocultures around the Mediterranean and at home. In addition, millions of students, researchers, and professionals now migrate annually from one country to another with an unprecedented ease sparked by processes of globalization and in spite of a return to populist-driven forms of wall-building nationalism.The anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021) have recently explained that humanity from the outset has always migrated. As a species, humans are ontologically open to the world and have no designated ecological niche. But as the planetary crises mentioned above suggest, migrations are motivated and express themselves in epic-making social movements called diasporas. Indeed, history might be defined as little more than a sequence of them. Evidence of this can be found in the explosion of migrant literatures and refugee tales that are urging us once again to reset our research agendas. Contributors to Diasporic Italy are summoned to speak to this ever-evolving present as they hone the skills needed to address their own diasporic heritage and affiliations.Current migrant literatures also illustrate the centrality, if not the urgency, of Diasporic Italy's mission statement: namely that diaspora peoples, in spite of their openness to the world, tend to settle in enclaves so as to hear their own language, enjoy their own cuisine, and recreate a shadow culture of the one they left behind, all the while struggling to adjust to the mores and customs of their host country of the moment. As world and national histories indicate, the counterworlds of diasporic Italy take form between the asymmetrical extremes of migritude (Patel 2010) on one hand and community on the other. Dialectically, they provide a stormy continuum for calculating the many ways in which Italy matters, not only as iconic allure and a depthless archive of names but also as an adaptive repertoire of performative practices within and beyond community rituals of ethnic identity formation.Diasporic Italy is both event and story. These two are not the same thing. Postmodernists would say that there is no event unless it is narrated. On the other hand, stories themselves are eventful. The journal aims to mediate between these two energies by encouraging new cross-disciplinary approaches equipped to transform event and story into knowledge. While migritude is universalistic (jus migrandi), ethnic communities are particularist. They define the good life in their own way, according to the traditional values they bring with them. To be sure, humans are the only species that does not adapt to the world, choosing instead to make it over. The right to migrate and the possibilities of freedom inevitably come up against the need to feel “at home” somewhere in the world. We are queerly caught between roots and routes.Although diasporas have always been explained in terms of statistics and the hard facts of social sciences, they remain elusive. Even minimal signs from individual lives, when treated intersectionally, can reveal an entire world. Taking a single novel like Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish, scholar Mary Jo Bona (2021) recently has tethered it to the author's lost childhood and an erased immigrant neighborhood. By helping to cull an archive from De Rosa's tormented life-world, Bona has tested the rewards of Marcel Mauss's method of the total social fact. How many other errant texts and lives from our canonic authors might we illuminate by constructing around them the archival reckoning they deserve? Scholars of diasporic Italy have already produced a vivid range of exemplary studies on film, popular culture, gendered life-writing, religion, canon formation, and the importance of translation studies. In the process, they also have opened up a number of conceptual passages leading to the journal's new paradigm.Two of these passages in particular call for further reflection insofar as they represent persuasive but distinct perspectives: namely, the notion of Italianità and its counterpoint, Italics. The first notion touches upon figural matters of subject formation, from stylization to stigmatization. Both of these moments, of self-fashioning and negative stereotyping, are rooted in specific community gestalts and allegiances. Italianità accepts the material entanglements of the ethnic commons in a world divided into nation-states and recognizes that we are after all embedded in neighborhoods, localities, and territories. Italy as cultural beacon is a geohistorical entity and has a dynamic national culture with edgy European Union and Mediterranean boundaries.The notion of “Italics” is more elitist; for its sponsors, Italy is not a territory or a nation so much as an untethered culture and language and perhaps even spirit. Stressing migritude over community, it focuses on the deterritorialized subject, its inner solitude, and talent for nomadic juxtapositions. Culture here works through exchange, circulation, credit, debt, saving and spending—much as does money. The only difference between culture as a system of Italic signs and money as expressed in the market economy, is this: culture has allegiances, odor, and all the sensuality of aesthetics. Money is based on sheer calculation and accumulates in banks. Perhaps contributors to Diasporic Italy will want to elaborate further on the dialectic extremes of migritude and community, Italianità and Italics. Transatlantic interest in contemporary Italian philosophy (Gianni Vattimo, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Maurizio Ferraris, Toni Negri) may be a useful vademecum.Ultimately, however, we must return to names, their blowback, and the enigmatic shadows they cast over diasporic Italy: the name we find ourselves in and the larger vision that emerges from these small matters. The journal offers itself as a gateway to an extravagant diasporic theater, where the dead always outnumber the living.