Francesco and Mary Giambelli Foundation Lecture Series: Fred Gardaphé

Francesco and Mary Giambelli Foundation
Lecture Series

In Education Begin Responsibilities
or
“They don’t know what they don’t know”

This talk is based on more than forty years of reading, studying, teaching, and writing about Americans of Italian descent. Fred Gardaphé surveys the education of Italian Americans in the United States and the development of Italian/American studies to expose and explore the tension created between the conscious and the unconscious of Italian people as we have become American people. Conscious in this context means the ways we publicly identify ourselves as Italian Americans and the ways we express that identity. Unconscious means the psychic elements that haunt us in our private thoughts, that come to us in dreams, and find their ways into our art: those thoughts and feelings that we cannot understand unless we engage in dialogues within and outside our communities. The resulting responsibility lies in the institutionalization of Italian/American studies.