Offering a kaleidoscopic perspective on the experiences of Italian workers on foreign soil, Italian Workers of the World explores the complex links between international class formation and nation building. Distinguished by an international panel of contributors, this wide-ranging volume examines how the reception of immigrants in their new countries shaped their sense of national identity and helped determine the nature of the multiethnic states in which they settled. In Argentina and Brazil, Italian migrants were welcomed as a civilizing influence and were instrumental in establishing and leading syndicalist and anarcho-syndicalist labor movements committed to labor internationalism. In the United States, by contrast, where Italian workers were greeted by the American Federation of Labor's hostility to socialism, internationalism, and unskilled laborers, they organized in ethnically mixed unions, including the radical Industrial Workers of the World. The xenophobia they encountered in the land of opportunity ultimately encouraged sympathy among Italian Americans for Mussolini's modernizing, imperialist ambitions for the Italian state.Covering the work of republican Garibaldi boundaries of historical nationalism.

In this transnational analysis of women and gender in Italy's world-wide migration, Franca Iacovetta and Donna Gabaccia challenge the stereotype of the Italian immigrant woman as silent and submissive; a woman who stays 'in the shadows.'

Italy's residents are a migratory people. Since 1800 well over 27 million left home, but over half also returned home again. As cosmopolitans, exiles, and 'workers of the world' they transformed their homeland and many of the countries where they worked or settled abroad. But did they form a diaspora? Migrants maintained firm ties to native villages, cities and families. Few felt much loyalty to a larger nation of Italians. Rather than form a 'nation unbound,' the transnational lives of Italy's migrants kept alive international regional cultures that challenged the hegemony of national states around the world. This ambitious and theoretically innovative overview examines the social, cultural and economic integration of Italian migrants. It explores their complex yet distinctive identity and their relationship with their homeland taking a comprehensive approach.

After examining immigrant political activity in the context of the rise of the racist Northern League, the book ends with a discussion of the possibilities that immigrant experiences are setting the stage for a new planetary working class movement."--BOOK JACKET.

Storming Heave in Steve Wright's unsurpassed study of Italian autonomist Marxism. This new edition remains the only book to examine Italian workerist theory and practice, from its origins in teh anti-Stalinist left of the 1950s to its heyday twenty years later. First developed by Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna and others, workerism, or 'orperaismo', includes the refusal of work, class self-organisation, mass illegality and the extension of revolutionary agency, all of which are still practised today by workers across the world. This edition includes a new chapter looking at the debates around operaismo and Autonomia since the book originally appeared in 2002.

With 24 plates by the WPA Federal art project of the city of New York. Sponsored by the Guilds' committee for Federal writer's publications, inc.