ITAL 250: Minority Identities in Film and Culture: The Italian American and African American Experience

Course Description

Explores the complex relation between Italian Americans and African Americans in the 19th and 20th century. Were Italian Americans white? What is whiteness? How does identity politics define the relation between minority groups? By looking at the problem of the construction of whiteness among Italian American and at the representation of their relation with African Americans in literature, movies and social studies we will discuss the problem of the relation between two minorities with often conflictual relations in the American context.