ELLIS ISLAND & BACK

If only the latterday racists who pasted up the thankfully worn & bleaching anti-immigration posters in the neighborhood would take a look at The Emigrants depicted in 1895 by Angiolo Tommasi waiting to embark in Genova (at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna)—however romantic, in its display of backs and packages at large a later version of Giandomenico Tiepolo's Mondo Novo—closed off both wistfully and tragically from the Old World of us. Identity itself, I've been noting in recent lectures on the poetics of dislocation, a synthesis of migrations.