Transnational Italian Studies

Italy's diasporas: a discussion between Donna R. Gabaccia, Lucy Riall, Pamela Ballinger, and Konstantina Zanou

“…Its transnational agenda has been taken up by journals like California Italian Studies and programmes of study, notably the transnational Italian Studies major at University of California Santa Barbara. 5 The transnational perspective has also shifted the conventional focus away from migrations to North America and towards those within the Mediterranean (Black Mediterranean Collective 2021; Carminati 2023; Hawthorne 2022; Isabella and Zanou 2016;Malia Hom 2019) and Latin American contexts (Gaggio 2021;Riall 2022b;Riccò 2022). Scholars have thus taken to heart Gabaccia's observation that the disproportionate scholarly attention paid to Italo-American communities obscured the reality that the US was not the 'preferred destination' of migrants from the Italian peninsula in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.…”