Resistance and Personal Archives. Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Italian American Women Writers’ Memoirs

Since the 1980s memoirs and other forms of self-writing have emerged as literary genres that enable individuals with an ethnic and working-class background to describe their experience as Americans, questioning patterns of acculturation and different perceptions of ethnicity. Within this framework, it can be argued that still relatively little attention has been paid to the role of personal and private archives in the context of "minority writing". Considering the case of Italian American women writers, this research aims at illuminating the connection between personal archives and memoirs in identity-making processes. In doing so, I will analyze Vertigo (1996) by Louise DeSalvo and Night Bloom. An Italian American Life (1998) by Mary Cappello as two examples of memoirs that engage with the issues of class, gender, and ethnicity, ultimately presenting them as autoethnographic works. From this perspective, the process of self-writing will be considered as an act of resistance that has a two-fold effect. First, it explores the private memories and the experience of women of Italian descent, thus complicating the issue of “consent and descent” that features Americanness. Secondly, these writings can also be interpreted as an attempt to trace a genealogy and re-write the collective history of a community whose identity has been constructed from the outside.