Domesticating Foreign Struggles

The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity

Paola Gemme

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780820343419, 9780820327075
• eBook ISBN: 9780820343990
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

When antebellum Americans talked about the contemporary struggle for Italian unification (the Risorgimento), they were often saying more about themselves than about Italy. In Domesticating Foreign Struggles Paola Gemme unpacks the American cultural record on the Risorgimento not only to make sense of the U.S. engagement with the broader world but also to understand the nation's domestic preoccupations.

Swayed by the myth of the United States as a catalyst of and model for global liberal movements, says Gemme, Americans saw parallels to their own history in the Risorgimento—and they said as much in newspapers, magazines, travel accounts, diplomatic dispatches, poems, maps, and paintings. And yet, in American eyes, Italians were too civically deficient to ever achieve republican goals. Such a view, says Gemme, reaffirmed cherished beliefs both in the United States as the center of world events and in the notion of American exceptionalism. Gemme argues that Americans also pondered the place of "subordinate" ethnic groups in domestic culture—especially Irish Catholic immigrants and enslaved African Americans—through the discourse on Risorgimento Italy.

Thus, says Gemme, national identity rested not only on differentiation from outside groups but also on a desire for internal racial and cultural homogeneity. Writing in a tradition pioneered by Amy Kaplan, Richard Slotkin, and others, Gemme advances the movement to "internationalize" American studies by situating the United States in its global cultural context.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Domesticating Foreign Struggles
• 1. Of American Mentors and Foreign Pupils: The Cultural Work of Republican Pedagogy
• 2. Of Revolutions and Commerce: The Imperial Vistas of Political Philanthropy
• 3. An American Jeremiah in Rome: Margaret Fuller’s Tribune Dispatches
• 4. Republican Debates I: The Color of the Republic
• 5. Republican Debates II: The Religion of the Republic
• Epilogue: Revolution and Immigration
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index