| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Those without a Country: The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists. By Michael Miller Topp. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. x, 319 pp. Cloth, $57.95, ISBN 0-8166-3649-4. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8166-3650-8.)

Although Italian American syndicalists of the Federazione Socialista Italiana (FSI) are the focus of this illuminating study, Michael Miller Topp's approach to his subject casts a wide and critically reflective gaze at the questions of class, ethnic, and gender identity within and beyond this politically engaged organization. Incorporating recent scholarship and primary documents from English- and Italian-language sources, Those without a Country provides important insights into the role of transnational radical migrants during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By probing the complicated and contradictory links between FSI activists and the Italian and American left, Topp demonstrates that even marginal groups such as the FSI participated in those defining moments of the political ferment that marked this period.

Key to determining the ethnic identity of the Italian American syndicalists is the reconceptualization of immigrants from traditionally displaced and assimilation-minded migrants to transnational migrants. Utilizing the paradigm of transnationalism, Topp firmly establishes the way that ethnic identity informed class and gender consciousness. FSI members readily deployed their Italian experiences and connections to demarcate the political landscape they inhabited in the United States. Italian American syndicalists reconfigured both the political struggles in Italy and their Italian American consciousness as non-white "other" in order to validate their transnational identity.

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