The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the United States Between 1890 and 1924

The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the United States Between 1890 and 1924
ISBN-10
0838641989
ISBN-13
9780838641989
Category
History
Pages
313
Language
English
Published
2009
Publisher
Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Author
Ilaria Serra

Description

Using original sources--such as newspaper articles, silent movies, letters, autobiographies, and interviews--Ilaria Serra depicts a large tapestry of images that accompanied mass Italian migration to the U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century. She chooses to translate the Italian concept of immaginario with the Latin imago that felicitously blends the double English translation of the word as "imagery" and "imaginary." Imago is a complex knot of collective representations of the immigrant subject, a mental production that finds concrete expression; impalpable, yet real. The "imagined immigrant" walks alongside the real one in flesh and rags.

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