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Article contents
Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy's Many Diasporas. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. 264 pp. $40.00 cloth; $22.00 paper; Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli, eds., Italian Workers of the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. 248 pp. $35.00 cloth.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2005
Extract
In the last decade Donna R. Gabaccia has spearheaded American efforts to compare and theorize about Italian emigrant workers in the Americas and Europe. In the 1980s she published two monographs that followed village-outward methods to examine the culture and politics of Sicilians in the United States. Her two books under review here, one edited with Fraser Ottanelli, are bursting with insightful comparisons and reflections upon Italy's “many diasporas.” They illuminate Italians' diverse roles in nation-building processes, how international and national commitments mingled, reinforced, or qualified one another, and how emigration shaped the history of modern Italy. Italian Workers of the World, the fruit of a well-coordinated international research project about the Italian working class on three continents, brings together essays that speak to one another across historiographical and linguistic traditions thanks to Gabaccia's and Ottanelli's editorial discipline. Italy's Many Diasporas showcases Gabaccia's gifts as a synthesizer of literature from many languages, and as a careful and concise historiographer. Both books are timely contributions that add empirical weight and measured theorizing to studies of transnationalism and international history.
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- © 2004 The International Labor and Working-Class History Society