LAUSR

Doria believed the plan to be “strumento per la riduzione delle disuguaglianze prodotte dal capitalismo, con un maggiore realismo rispetto alla visione del New Deal” (p. 295). Although Oltreoceano wants to adopt a comparative approach to its subject of studies, for the most part the various essays included in the book use a much narrower methodology, which prevents them from discussing the Italian American social and political products engendered by the encounters of Italian academics with American society. Exchanges between cultures and countries are hardly unidirectional, and the contacts one may have with another tradition inevitably recast his or her perspective. However, some of the essays in Oltreoceano present Italian scholars and politicians as if they were invulnerable to this predictable and very common hybridization phenomenon; how the American experience affected these expatriates remains unclear. These essays lack the rigor of a comparative research, which by using sources written in different languages can synthesize multiple viewpoints and illustrate possible relationships between countries, cultures, and in certain cases even continents. Some of the authors contributing to Oltreoceano have consulted only sources written and published in Italy, a methodological choice that has greatly narrowed the interdisciplinarity endorsed by the book. Other essays, which are also the most successful in responding to the objectives of Grippa’s project, show instead a more systematic awareness of comparative practices and demonstrate a genuine interest in understanding and intertwining social and political Italian American affairs. These studies, arrayed especially in the second segment of the text, are also very effective in outlining the “political communication,” i.e. the “dialogue,” between Italian and American intellectuals. Oltreoceano helps to further a line of inquiry originated in other studies investigating how Italian intellectuals helped to shape American democracy in the 19th century. In this regard, one may think of Enrico Dal Lago’s comparative work on the American Civil War and the Risorgimento and Paola Gemme’s research on the Risorgimento and the Antebellum American identity. As most of the intellectuals whose activities are discussed in the book must have adopted both,Oltreoceanomakes us reconsider the level of communicability existing between Italian and Italian American identities.