I margini degli Stati Uniti

The essay is focused on the many financial scandals that have surfaced in and around Wall Street since last year, from the giant Enron bankruptcy of December 2001 to the unprecedented WorldCom accounting scandal of June 2002. The author follows essentially the chronology of the events, making use of the assiduous, accurate chronicles that the main newspapers and magazines have devoted to them. At the same time he points out that all too often the attention of those media has concentrated almost exclusively on the deeds and misdeeds of the financial managers and their “cronies” – Paul Krugman’s word. Instead he discusses the Wall Street crisis in terms both of what it is in the financial world, and of what it means within the larger context of the deep social problems characterizing today’s American capitalism and society.

Taking the media coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill as its starting point, this essay discusses the meanings and values assigned to Alaska in the popular national imagination. In spite of its intensive industrial and commercial exploitation, and in spite of the Native peoples living there and drawing their sustenance from its resources, Alaska is constantly represented as a pristine wilderness area, and thus functions as an important national salvation whose existence alleviates fears about the environmental doom facing the US. Like previous mythic frontiers, it functions as a complex rhetorical strategy that simultaneously advances and denies the United States’ desires for expansion; it promises the nation opportunities for renewal, while denying the historical fact of American imperialism, and concealing the man-made, cultural quality of the notion of “wilderness” as a socially constituted place that embodies assumptions about the Euro- American self more than it depicts any actual geographical landscape.

New Mexico is a region whose cultural identity has been shaped by its Native American legacy and two subsequent processes of European colonization. Spanish colonizers settled in the area during the XVII century as dominators, then, after the Mexican-American War, Anglo-Americans took over. Francisco Lomelí’s essay, that retraces the historical and cultural processes that shaped one of the most Native American and Hispanic state in the Union, explores the political and social relevance both of the oral tradition and the Hispanic-Mexican literary heritage.

The essay analyses the ways in which immigrant working-class Puerto Ricans to the mainland have negotiated their culture in the Anglo environment of the US. Beyond pressures to assimilate, and against the risk of yielding to cultural genocide, the Nuyoricans (second generation youth grown up in contact with both English and Spanish) have given shape to a unique culture that brings together the ethnically mixed heritage of Puerto Rico and the interplay of Afro and Latino cultures on the continent. Special attention is given to how the permanence of a colonial context of immigration, and of a national Puerto Rican backgrond, has helped to shape and define the nuyorican culture. On the other hand, Flores also considers the similarities and differences between Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans, the backbone – as Flores says - of Latino experience in the US. In this frame of reference, Flores points out that the “awakening of Nuyorican cultural consciousness” can be analysed in a four-folded fashion: the “here and now” moment of the discovery of NYC as a place of deprivation; the reaching back to an Edenic image of the island; the return and acknowledgement of NYC as home; the conscious branching out towards other minority groups of the continent. Throughout the essay, instances of the four moments in Nuyorican poetry are brought to the front.

On July 16 every year an ever increasing crowd of immigrants from Haiti converge on the church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in East Harlem, New York, and join the Marian procession of Italian Americans, who used to inhabit the area in large numbers. This essay aims at highlighting two crucial aspects in the social and cultural life of this anomalous urban celebration. First, it analyzes the role it plays in the local ethnic scene. Second, it explores the various spatial, temporal, social, and cultural “margins” providing the backdrop for its actual performance. The overall theoretical intent of the essay is to offer some analytical suggestions for an inquiry into contemporary urban life, regarding it not as a merely local phenomenon, but rather as the unstable result of a network of connections, processes and relationships operating on a global scale.

An autobiographical piece in which the author explores the gap between the official interpretation of Hawaian culture, transmitted in school by white poeple, and her personal experience mediated by her own family tradition.

Dated 1931 and unpublished until 1993, this is the first narrative work by Tillie Olsen, written when she was very active in the American Left. The textual analysis reveals thematic, stylistic and linguistic modes which echo in her later work – some connected to the political activity within the Communist party and related to proletarian realism, theorized by Michael Gold; others already revealing the intellectual autonomy and independence that will be among the distinctive traits of Olsen’s work. The picture of the American Depression years is depicted with honesty, and there doesn’t seem to be room for hope, since a young life is broken by poverty and absent social welfare. The writer’s personal experience confirms the idea: the circumstance of her life will silence her literary career; when she will write again the result is short stories renowned among the best among the world literature.

While critics usually highlight the biographical richness of The Glass Menagerie or focus on the play as foreground to domestic realism in the American stage, few have seen it as Williams intended, that the play represents a “new plastic” theatre. From his earliest short story, The Vengeance of Nitocris (1928) to The Glass Menagerie (1945), Williams’ creative works are emboldened by flight patterns that give them a sense of the fugitive. Transposed on stage, this results in a plasticity that is inextricably bound up with the performative. This paper reads Williams’ play not as a fruition of biographical aspects; instead it posits that flight and performance embody “postmodern” identity.