Raising aesthetic questions about ethnic writing has been opposed by those who associate aesthetic concerns with an elitist betrayal of social roots of ethnic art and by postmodern critics who deny claims of heritage on individuals. Both attitudes have obscured how clash between old worlds of origin and new American lives evident in current ethnic writing can operate to create an innovative, socially relevant aesthetic. Yet it is possible to formulate a conception of relationship between historical and formal properties of recent Italian American writing that can serve as basis for an understanding of an innovative and even revolutionary aesthetic that it may share with ethnic writing. Italian American writing helps return history to center stage after postmodern denials of its lasting and ongoing effects. Ethnic heritage is history in action; it subjects fact of immigration to a scrutiny of its ongoing effects. It not only exposes historical episodes of conflict between margin and mainstream, but also reveals lasting impact of immigration on individuals who may be second or third generation. Its aesthetic experiment returns a new combination of realism and symbolism to current writing and explores interactions between public and private worlds. It constitutes a revolt against devaluation of past, of heritage, history, and individual in postmodern critical discourse. Italian Americans are heirs to two diaspora: first from Italy (predominantly from South) from 1880 to 1920s and second from post-World-War-II urban Little Italys throughout America. The first transposed Italian lives into new world; second preserved Italianita by a process of appropriation or reinterpretation. Both journeys produced narratives of cultural collision and change. Recent writing constitutes an emerging ethnic aesthetic which both draws on and gets beyond conventions of postmodernism that have guided critical discussion in past decades. This aesthetic revolutionizes our thinking about current art with a powerful return to realism about continuities of history, and to symbolism in dealing with complexity of individual experience. It introduces new approaches to interaction between America and its ethnics. The innovative aesthetic of contemporary Italian American writing challenges many tenets of postmodern theory and, by doing so, acts as a corrective and even revolutionary force. The excesses of much postmodern theory include its denial of force of class, economics, and history as felt effects preserved in individual consciousness, its outsized affirmations of universal unreality and simulacra, its repudiation of individual subject, its failure to deal with affect, and its de facto relegation of ethnic other to static role of victim forever without a public voice. An important first step in challenging such excesses is to restore to our awareness longtime role ethnic art has itself played as an avant-garde in canon of modern literature. Doing so helps underscore how empirical energies of ethnic writing encompass concern for those at margins and incorporate social concerns in practice of art. The formal energies of Italian American art cannot be separated from its democratic embrace of consciousness of individuals as valuable in its own right and as a barometer of pressures on character and culture. The stature of ethnic has been devalued in a general postmodern mistrust of individual as hegemon: Enlightenment epistemology ... produced as its most common and worst effect sense of unity and privilege in observing self (Brooker 165). The ethnic is ruled out by such absolute definitions of as simply imperialistic or narcissistic, a view Levi-Strauss may have had in mind when he referred to as the spoiled brat of philosophy. In their extremism, these absolute views are questionable and have little to do with actual practice of ethnic writing or current use of ethnic as a site for intersection of cultural and personal complexities. …