Not White on Arrival: Unearthing the Memory of Italian American Slavery in Mary Bucci Bush’s Sweet Hope

The essay analyzes the representation of race and ethnicity in Mary Bucci Bush’s novel Sweet Hope (2011), which tells the story of the Italian peasants who migrated to American with the hope of building up a new life for them and their families, and ended up working in the Southern plantations as replacements of the former Black slaves who had left for the Northern cities, as it happened with the Sunnyside Plantation in Arkansas, whose workforce at the end of the 19th century mostly consisted of migrants from Northern and Eastern Italy. The pluralistic perspective of the novel, which switches the point of view from one character to another, tries to create a fictional substitute collective memory to fill the gaps in the official historical reconstructions of the Italian American experiences by unearthing personal recollections which never made into “history,” and to highlight how the racial identity of Italian Americans in many cases was not so clearly “white on arrival.”