Embroidered Tales: Decoding Girls’s Home Needlework from the Italian Diaspora

For Italian immigrants and their descendants, needlework represents a marker of id, a cultural touchstone as highly effective as pasta and Neapolitan music. Out of the artifacts of their reminiscence and creativeness, Italian immigrants and their descendants used embroidering, stitching, knitting, and crocheting to assist outline who they had been and who they’ve grow to be. This e book is an interdisciplinary assortment of artistic work by authors of Italian origin and tutorial essays. The artistic works from thirty-seven contributors embrace memoir, poetry, and visible arts whereas the gathering as an entire explores a large number of experiences about and approaches to needlework and immigration from a transnational perspective, spanning the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.

On the heart of the e book, over thirty illustrations symbolize Italian immigrant girls’s needlework. The textual content reveals the various processes by which a easy object, and even the reminiscence of that object, turns into one thing else by literary, visible, efficiency, ethnographic, or important reimagining. Whereas primarily involved with interpretations of needlework quite than the needlework itself, the editors and contributors to Embroidered Tales stay aware of its historical past and its related cultural values, which Italian immigrants introduced with them to the USA, Canada, Australia, and Argentina and handed on to their descendants.