The
organizing committee of the 38th annual conference of the AIHA welcomes
the association to Los Angeles at its first meeting ever to be held
in Southern California. This meeting will provide an opportunity
to highlight the culture and history of Italians in Southern California,
while examining current methods of oral historical and ethnographic
research vis-à-vis Italian Americans. Further, the Italian
Oral History Institute, along with local co-sponsoring organizations,
will produce a month-long multi-media festival (concerts, readings,
exhibitions, films, workshops, etc.): Italian Los Angeles: Celebrating
Italian Life, Local History, and the Arts in Southern California,
to coincide partially with, and thereby enhance, the AIHA conference.
Please plan to come early and enjoy some of these events.
UCLA and the Westwood Village area of Los Angeles offer many opportunities
for conference-goers. It is an intrinsically attractive location
(with easy access to the ocean, to the Getty Museum, and other Los
Angeles tourist sites), in close proximity to major centers of Italian
culture and history: the Italian Consulate, the Istituto Italiano
di Cultura, UCLA, and all within walking distance of the conference
hotel (the Doubletree Hotel Westwood). See: Los
Angeles: Points of Interest.
Introduction
Memory
forms the “archive” of oral culture and, consequently,
the repository of oral history. In our technological age, these
may no longer be merely orally-transmitted (in the “face-to-face
encounters of small groups”), but rather find their way into
visual, aural, performed, as well as spoken, “products.”
Folklorists and oral historians record memory, explore its dynamic
processes and the modes of oral cultural production, and frequently
place individual memory in broader cultural and historical contexts.
Such research pivots on fieldwork (e.g., interviews, photography,
videography). We depart from the premise that, by and large, Italian
Americans descend from Italian peasant (and artisan) oral cultures,
and that this “deep” ethnographic background resonates,
to varying degree, acknowledged or not, whether as direct or as
memorial experience, in their sense of Italian heritage. In consequence,
when acts of recovery are attempted (even if simply as a search
for fading or lost knowledge), contact with this traditional oral
culture is revitalized and comes to form one of its prime motivations.
(excerpt from: Luisa Del Giudice, “Speaking Memory: Oral History, Oral Culture and Italians in America,” forthcoming publication. All rights reserved.)
