Friday September 29, 6 PM EDT. I Am Books - 189 North St, Boston 02113. "In the Name of the Mother" examines the investment of black male writers and intellectuals in Italian immigrants and Italian Americans and the response of Italian American writers and artists to American blackness in the 20th century.

Samuele Pardini links the African American literature under examination to the Mediterranean tradition of the Italian immigrants and read them both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism and transatlantic modernity in the West.

This historically overlooked and, for the most part, critically unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable to produce democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy. This volume emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,” a view that enlarges and complicated the color-base dimension of American racial discourse.