Italian Colony of São Paulo

Giulia Riccò is an assistant professor of Italian at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

• Introduction: São Paulo, Nova York da Sul America:Italian Immigrants in São Paulo and the Making of Modern Brazilian Culture 11. Tutto è italiano: Gina Lombroso Ferrero and the Cultivation of Italian São Paulo 222. Cidadão italiano residente em São Paulo: Modernism, Cannibalism, and the Italians of São Paulo 503. I perchè nu so naziunale? José Correia Leite, Blackness, and New World Italians 774. Sob o signo da Dante: Miguel Reale, Italianness, and Fascism 1085. Muito parecida mas completamente diferente: Zélia Gattai,Multidirectionality, and the Italian Anarchists 135Coda: Whose Italianness? 167Acknowledgments 175Notes 181Bibliography 227Index 247

"The Italian Colony of São Paolo is a groundbreaking study of Italian immigration to Brazil and the formation of Italian ethnic identity within a multiracial society marked by a large Black population and a legacy of plantation slavery. Giulia Riccò draws on a rich array of voices - including elite Italian travelers, literary modernists, working-class Black Brazilians living alongside Italians, middle-class Italo-Brazilians with fascist leanings, and labor-oriented working-class Italo-Brazilians. She shows that Italians in Brazil succeeded in positioning themselves as exemplars of Mediterranean whiteness, in contrast to Italians in the United States, who often faced stigmatization due to their imagined closeness to Blackness." - Christopher Dunn, Tulane University, author of Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil "The Italian Colony of São Paulo offers illuminating perspectives on the Italian presence in Brazil, on the wider history of Italian migration, and on what that history can tell us about racial politics in a variety of locations, including Italy and the United States. With originality and analytical depth, the author delivers a powerful critique of ethnicity and its politics, significantly enriching and repositioning the growing body of work on Italians in the Americas." -Loredana Polezzi, Stony Brook University "Riccò has penned a brilliant and timely study not only of the experiences of Italians in Brazil, but of how Brazilian racial theorists, writers and journalists portrayed them as "vectors of whiteness" that elevated them above other immigrant groups and, of course, Black Brazilians." - The Latin American Review of Books