This collection of articles examines the complex nature of identity in the Italian-American community. Sorrentino and Krase have constructed a volume that covers topics of diverse interest, such as the development of Italian-American literary studies and the integration of a uniquely Italian-American sensibility into a larger and dominant idea of European American culture. As an erudite examination of contemporary studies being done on one of the largest ethnic groups in the United States, this work is an essential addition to the ongoing and contentious debates about the nature of ethnicity, identity, assimilation and acculturation in the United States.
From Saturday Night Fever to Jersey Shore, Italian American youth in New York City have appropriated—and been appropriated by—popular American culture. Here, Donald Tricarico investigates how Italian ethnicity has been used to fashion Guido as a distinct youth style that signals inclusion in popular American culture and, simultaneously, the making of a new ethnic subject. Emerging from a wave of Italian immigration after World War II in outer borough neighborhoods such as Bensonhurst, the story of the Guido is an Italian American story, symbolizing the negotiation of a negatively privileged ethnicity within American society. Tricarico takes up questions about the definition of Guido, the role of disco, and the identity politics of Jersey Shore in order to reconsider the significance of Guido for the study of Italian American ethnicity.
Italian Colonialism is a pioneering anthology of texts by scholars from seven countries who represent the best of classical and newer approaches to the study of Italian colonization. Essays on the political, economic, and military aspects of Italian colonialism are featured alongside works that reflect the insights of anthropology, race and gender studies, film, architecture, and oral and cultural history. The volume includes many essays by Italian and African scholars that have never been translated into English. It is a unique resource that offers students and scholars a comprehensive view of the field.
This collection offers a fresh re-reading and re-imagining of Italian Americans in film, from actors to directors, from subject to agency. The trans-Atlantic discourse that emerges from these keenly insightful essays offers a guidepost for future analyses. As we come to understand the evolving paradigm of Italian Americans, whose cinematic representation has long been object of discussion and debate, Mediated Ethnicity constitutes a prismatic lens through which the contemporary viewer/reader may re-discover the cultural positioning of Italians in America. - John Tintori Associate Arts Professor and Chair, Graduate Film Program New York University Tisch School of the Arts
This collection gathers more than twenty referred essays from three years of the annual conferences (2012-2014) of the Italian American Studies Association. The arts, history, demographics, and politics are just some of the topics examined herein. The reader of this collection will come away with a broad picture of what we might identify as Italian America and its various nooks and crannies.
Over the course of 130 years, Italian American Catholics in New York City have developed a varied repertoire of devotional art and architecture to create community-based sacred spaces in their homes and neighborhoods. These spaces exist outside of but in relationship to the consecrated halls of local parishes and are sites of worship in conventionally secular locations. Such ethnic building traditions and urban ethnic landscapes have long been neglected by all but a few scholars. Joseph Sciorra’s Built with Faith offers a place-centric, ethnographic study of the religious material culture of New York City’s Italian American Catholics. Sciorra spent thirty-five years researching these community art forms and interviewing Italian immigrant and U.S.-born Catholics. By documenting the folklife of this group, Sciorra reveals how Italian Americans in the city use expressive culture and religious practices to transform everyday urban space into unique, communal sites of ethnically infused religiosity. The folk aesthetics practiced by individuals within their communities are integral to understanding how art is conceptualized, implemented, and esteemed outside of museum and gallery walls. Yard shrines, sidewalk altars, Nativity presepi, Christmas house displays, a stone-studded grotto, and neighborhood processions—often dismissed as kitsch or prized as folk art—all provide examples of the vibrant and varied ways contemporary Italian Americans use material culture, architecture, and public ceremonial display to shape the city’s religious and cultural landscapes. Written in an accessible style that will appeal to general readers and scholars alike, Sciorra’s unique study contributes to our understanding of how value and meaning are reproduced at the confluences of everyday life. Joseph Sciorra is the director of Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College. He is the editor of Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives and co-editor of Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women's Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora.
No one represents the Italian American journey from undesirable outsiders to embraced citizens better than Frank Sinatra. From impoverished beginnings in an immigrant household to world renown as "Chairman of the Board," he beat the odds to become one of the most influential and best-loved artists of the twentieth century. Sinatra's symbolic role to the millions of Italian American immigrants who looked up to him as proof of the American dream was far-reaching. From teenage crooner to civil rights activist to Reagan Republican, his shifting identity resonated deeply in Italian American culture. Now, a gathering of distinguished historians, journalists and critics explore Sinatra's impact on American culture, from questions of politics and civil rights to Italian mothering, morality, and ethnic stereotyping. These insights place Sinatra at the fulcrum of many controversial and timely issues that lend his influence a new depth and power, not only musically but in a broad historical context.
Race and Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861-1911 examines the development of Italian southern question discourse based on the perceived cultural, political, and economic divide between north and south. This book describes the resonance of meridionalism and how the familiarity of its language lent itself to other discussions of difference--the racialization of the southern question and its appropriation by criminal anthropologists in constructing biological hierarchies; the comparisons between the conquest of Africa and the internal colonization of the south; and the establishment of a southern Italian diaspora whose unique racial characteristics could lead to a possible new form of imperialism in South America.
Best Food Book of 2014 by The Atlantic Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, Simone Cinotto recreates the bustling world of Italian life in New York City and demonstrates how food was at the center of the lives of immigrants and their children. From generational conflicts resolved around the family table to a vibrant food-based economy of ethnic producers, importers, and restaurateurs, food was essential to the creation of an Italian American identity. Italian American foods offered not only sustenance but also powerful narratives of community and difference, tradition and innovation as immigrants made their way through a city divided by class conflict, ethnic hostility, and racialized inequalities. Drawing on a vast array of resources including fascinating, rarely explored primary documents and fresh approaches in the study of consumer culture, Cinotto argues that Italian immigrants created a distinctive culture of food as a symbolic response to the needs of immigrant life, from the struggle for personal and group identity to the pursuit of social and economic power. Adding a transnational dimension to the study of Italian American foodways, Cinotto recasts Italian American food culture as an American "invention" resonant with traces of tradition.
Leaving Little Italy explores the various forces that have shaped and continue to mold Italian American culture. Early chapters offer a historical survey of major developments in Italian American culture, from the early mass immigration period to the present day, situating these developments within the larger framework of American culture as a whole. Subsequent chapters examine particular works of Italian American literature and film from a variety of perspectives, including literary history, gender, social class, autobiography, and race. Paying particular attention to how the individual artist's personality has intersected with community in the shaping of Italian American culture, the book reveals how and why Italian America was invented and why Little Italys must ultimately disappear.
