Previous messages from the Executive Council:

June 7, 2020

The AAIS condemns the continued racist violence enacted on black lives, in the US as elsewhere. We stand in solidarity with protest at the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade and so many others. We stand in solidarity with the resistance to the everyday racial injustices that Christian Cooper’s Central Park experience exemplifies. 

As an association of scholars based in fields within the humanities, we strive to act upon humanist beliefs “which stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek [….] ways of solving human problems” (OED). It is clear that we are still facing grave human problems surrounding racial justice. Now, more than ever, we must examine our roles as scholars and educators in a broader community of learning, and consider the ways in which our work advances necessary conversations about justice and equality, while also lifting up voices, experiences, and texts that have too often been kept at the margins.

As the American Association of Italian Studies, we negotiate the intercultural dynamics between those identities—American and Italian—and try to draw meaningful correspondences between what we study and teach, and where. We do this for our students and we do it for ourselves. In recent years the Association has sought to host roundtables, workshops, and plenaries at our annual conference raising and addressing questions of diversity and inclusion in Italian Studies. We recognize that we can do more, and we want to. It is time to critically examine our own participation in deeply rooted expressions of structural racism, and to actively work toward institutional change reflecting anti-racist and decolonial principles.

With this in mind, we are taking these preliminary actions:  

--- Convening a task force to not only work toward greater attention to diversity and inclusion in the field of Italian Studies, but to assess how we might best incorporate and promote principles of anti-racism and de-coloniality into our organizational structure. We invite you to reach out if you are willing to serve. 

--- Creating additional space for dialogue and exchange on the AAIS website, through the under-utilized “Forum” feature. While we no longer have a listserv, we do have a dedicated space for asynchronous exchange and we encourage you to use it. You will see here https://aais.wildapricot.org/forum a new tab entitled “Confronting Structural Racism in Italian Studies,” with subfolders for sharing ideas, questions and materials such as syllabi. Change will come from exchange and, in addition to the focused work of the task force, we need more generative discussion from a broad base of membership.

In order to arrive at ideas for concrete programming and policies that can address what one member has called “the unbearable whiteness of Italian Studies,” we must work actively, and collectively, toward change. The EC is committed to directing time, energy, and effort into development and implementation, but for programming to succeed, it must have input from members. 

We want to register a clear condemnation of the racial injustices that happen around us every day. We want to (re)commit to the humanistic principles that undergird our intersecting and related fields. We invite you to join us. 

AAIS Executive Council

Ellen Nerenberg, Monica Seger, Eva Del Soldato & Cosetta Gaudenzi

February 1, 2017

Dear colleagues,

We write as members of the executive of the American Association of Italian Studies to express our deep concern about the decision by our newly elected president to place restrictions and holds on the entry into the United States of many immigrants and visitors who have dutifully obtained permission to come live in or visit the country.

Without getting into the validity of these decisions or the political issues that relate to them, we believe it is important to consider how these restrictions affect many of our colleagues, and graduate and undergraduate students, but also neighbors and others who come from countries affected by the executive orders. Many come from war torn areas, and have suffered tremendous personal losses, as well as already significant and extended scrutiny in obtaining the permissions that are now being questioned and put on hold. Others have already been victimized because, even though they practice a particular religion, it is not the specific current of that religion that others in their countries profess. Some decided to subject themselves to this uprooting spurred by the hope to be reunited with members of their families already in this country, or by the promise of leading a life that does not involve going to bed at night wondering if you will wake up in the morning still in one piece. 

Why should this matter to us as members of the AAIS? It should for many reasons, none more important than as a reminder of how members of the culture and history we make our own once were equally victimized by executive orders and popular sentiment that we now see replicated toward others. We hope many of you have seen and read the article that our colleague and fellow member, Professor Anthony Tamburri, has written about his family’s personal experience with the Alien Enemies Act in 1942.

We would like to go back even further in time to remind ourselves that Italians were once vilified and excluded as dangerous to the health of the nation in similar ways to those we are witnessing today. For example, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 (alternately known as the Immigration Act of 1924) was clearly meant to exclude Italian immigrants (who had come in droves in the period 1890-1920), since it restricted annual immigration from any country to 2% of the numbers from that country who had been living in the United States as of the 1890 census. Given how many more Italian (and Eastern European/Jewish) immigrants had come to the United States in the 1890-1920 years, the act obviously targeted and excluded them in primis. That was preceded in 1919 and 1920 by the infamous Palmer Raids, which targeted anarchists and political activists (many of whom were Italian) who were imprisoned and deported because their ideas were at odds with those of the government. Finally, to complete the analogy, threats to the wellbeing of Italian immigrants were often carried out in lynchings, none more egregious than the New Orleans lynching of 11 Italians in 1891 (the largest mass-lynching in American history), or the subsequent one of 5 Italian citizens in Tallulah, MS in 1899.

We write, therefore, asking our membership to think about how it wishes to act moving forward. Regardless of our political convictions, stripes, colors, or religious affiliation, it behooves us to empathize with those who are subject to these new dispositions because, once in a past that is not that distant, many of our own relatives, families, and friends might have experienced similar disruptions and fearful holds on their movement into this country (for many with similar long delays or return trips to Italy). We also need, where possible, to join in questioning the appropriateness of these actions, not because our government does not have the power (if not necessarily the right) to enforce acts that it deems appropriate for its security; but because the targeted nature of these measures seems haphazard and capricious (as Professor Tamburri points out in his article, no citizens from the countries targeted by the executive orders have been responsible for terrorist acts on American soil). As we know, capriciousness and ideological exclusions have often led to behaviors and restrictions on human rights that have had and continue to have tremendous negative impacts on our fragile, commonly shared humanity.

- The AAIS Executive Council