America as a Mirror of Modernity

Italian Politics and Culture from Fascism to Postwar Democracy in the Life and Work of Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello (1906–1969)

The Italian American Studies Association at Fifty-Five: 1966–2021

Remembering Italian America: Memory, Migration, Identity

Prosthetic Memories in <em>The Sopranos</em>

Becoming Italian

Conventional scholarly wisdom has it that most Italian Americans in the United States were loyal supporters of the policies of Fascism in the inter-war years but eventually rejected the antisemitic measures that Benito Mussolini's regime adopted in their ancestral country in 1938. Contrary to such an interpretation, Luconi argues that many Italian Americans themselves held antisemitic attitudes and, therefore, did not distance themselves from Fascism after Mussolini launched his campaign against Italian Jews. He also contends that these attitudes resulted less from an ideological commitment to Fascism than from both the strained relations between Italian Americans and Jewish Americans, and the antisemitic climate of opinion that characterized American society in the 1930s. Italian Americans and Jews were partners in the labour movement and the Democratic Party. Yet the former resented the latter's distrust in Italian Americans' labour militancy, as well as the earlier rise of Jews in the hierarchies of the unions and the Democratic Party. Furthermore, Italian Americans and Jews competed for jobs, political patronage, cheap housing and relief benefits, especially during the Depression years. Such ethnic rivalries and the appeal of right-wing organizations to Italian Americans contributed to make the latter prone to antisemitism. As a result, few Americans of Italian descent came out against the racial policy of the Fascist regime.

Examining the family saga as an instrument of literary analysis of writing by Italian American women, this book argues that the genre represents a key strategy for Italian American female writers as a form which distinctly allows them to establish cultural, gender and literary traditions. Spaces are inherently marked by the ideology of the societies that create and practice them, and this volume engages with spaces of cultural and gendered identity, particularly those of the ‘mean streets’ in Italian American fiction, which provide a method of critically analyzing the configurations and representations of identity associated with the Italian American community. Key authors examined include Julia Savarese, Marion Benasutti, Tina De Rosa, Helen Barolini, Melania Mazzucco and Laurie Fabiano. This book is suitable for students and scholars in Literature, Italian Studies, Cultural Studies and Gender Studies.

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

The Covello Papers is a collection of documents that has abundant source material on the relationship between eating habits and ethnicity in the Italian American community of New York City during the interwar years. The collection was gathered from 1907 to 1974 by Leonard Covello, an Italian American teacher and scholar who worked in the northeastern area of Manhattan called East Harlem. Today the neighborhood hosts mainly Latinos and is better known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio. During the 1920s and 1930s, however, the neighborhood was home to as many as ninety thousand first- and second-generation Italian immigrants; it was the largest Italian American enclave in the United States.1 The documents in the collection are heterogeneous. Most relevant for our purposes are Covello's transcriptions of interviews he conducted with the Italian immigrants of East Harlem and their children and written assignments by his students, most of them second-generation Italian Americans. An important part of this body of oral and written sources was to become the basis of Covello's 1944 New York University doctoral dissertation on the cultural background of Italian American students in New York schools; the students were the main focus of his public, professional, and intellectual work.2 These sources turn out to be crucial for understanding the connection between eating habits and ethnic identity, for they make it possible to reconstruct representations of Italian American ethnicity enacted by means of the food metaphor. They show how immigrants drew heavily on symbols of food and conviviality as they forged collective self-representations of their being Italian in America.

America on film: representing race, class, gender, and sexuality at the movies

<i>Percorsi di un italiano all'estero</i>: Robert Viscusi Replies to Rosemary Serra

The transnational public sphere THE PUBLIC sphere is back. After a long period when it was associated with the liberal democratic ideal of a domain of pure rational discourse to counter the power of the centralised state, the public sphere is now being thought of in different ways. (1) In media and cultural studies as well as in cultural politics, re-invigoration of the public sphere as a site for critical analysis (along with a renewed interest in the citizen) has arisen from a certain loss of faith in oppositional, class-based critique of media and its role in the mediation of society (Mouffe, 1992: 225). This new direction in cultural and media studies has resulted in a concurrent shift away from the social aspects of media effects with its focus on the audience, to a concern for the discursive constitution of the public through media discourse. (2) This concern for the constitution of a media public lies at the heart of debates about the future of democracy, where democratic processes are tempered and indeed controlled by the management of public opinion within the mediated public sphere (Dahlgren, 1995: 2; Goode, 1996: 69-70). These days, it is increasingly difficult to speak of democracy without at the same time speaking about the `public debate', or the `public interest', staged through the media. The public needs to be differentiated from the audience. They are two different things. The audience exists as a social category brought into a certain relationship with the media, while the public is a creation of the media (in and of society itself). Ien Ang (1991: 26-32) argues that in addressing an audience, the media constitute publicness through projecting what they believe the audience to be like. The audience, for its part, becomes part of a media public through recognising itself in the mode of address adopted by the media in their attempts to create a public constituency. It follows then, that the mediated public sphere owes its existence to the media: It is an ephemeral space of mediated public address, debate and discussion in which various identities become apparent to audiences on a large scale. The mediated public sphere is also intimately caught up in the everyday social realities of the audience, whose sense of belonging is based on a public imaginary created through their interaction with the media. The public sphere and the audience are thus enmeshed through media mediation (mediazation), but with the media as its leading dimension. In this paper, I am concerned to address the emergence of a mediated transnational public sphere, its capacity to manage global issues on behalf of a democratic world order, and its affects within local and regional contexts. The possibility of a transnational public sphere has arisen because of the rapid spread of globalised media communication throughout the world. This has led to an acceleration of media circulation, an interlinking of live telecommuni-cation networks which draw disparate areas together in new arrangements. In effect a certain kind of transformation of the public sphere itself has begun. Public opinion has become much more immediately effective in the day-to-day conduct of government and political debate. What happens to political debate and public opinion when we consider the possibility of the emergence of transnational public spheres? National issues circulating within a domestic context are at the same time circulating within broader regional contexts in such a way that they affect responses at the local level. What kind of media publics does this process produce, and how might they be oriented to world issues in a democratic manner? Before pressing on, I would like to clarify what I mean by the term `transnational'. `Transnational' is not the same as `international' (Robertson, 1990: 24). From an international perspective, nations remain integrated wholes, relating to each other as independent entities. …

Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, this book 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, the book 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. For generations of Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Calabrese immigrants in New York, Italian American cuisine was much more than a remnant of the home country; the book shows how the Italian American table we now celebrate emerged as the outcome of years of selective incorporations of cultural fragments, resources, and meanings available to the immigrant community. Adding a transnational dimension to the study of Italian American foodways, the book recasts Italian American food culture as an American “invention” resonant with traces of tradition.

Luigi Donato Ventura, a Trilingual Self-translator

In the face of a growing scholarship stressing Italian Americans' conservatism, the purpose of the book under review here is to rescue the radical experience of this ethnic minority from historical oblivion. To this end, Philip V. Can-nistraro and Gerald Meyer have gathered an impressive collection of essays that deal with the multifaceted components of such a tradition, spanning from the inner struggles within the anarchist movement at the turn of the twentieth century to the activities of Father James Groppi and Mario Savio in the civil rights and student movements of the 1960s. That Savio was also involved in the mobilizations against California's propositions 187 and 209 in 1994 and 1996 offers evidence for the survival of some components of the Italian American radical militancy into the late twentieth century. Still, Groppi's and Savio's cases were too peculiar to challenge the thesis of the ultimate “loss” of the world of Italian American radicalism, as Donna Gabaccia conversely suggests in her conclusion (p. 318). Actually, the two decades before the end of World War I witnessed the heyday of Italian Americans' class consciousness. But in the following years, as Rudolph Vecoli aptly argues, the Red Scare and the “fascistization” of the Little Italys marked the collapse of radicalism in the Italian American communities. Specifically, the spread of nationalistic feelings in the wake of Benito Mussolini's rise to power helped the demise of the transnationalism on which Italian Americans' radical world view had rested. Indeed, while American society perceived socialism, anarchism, and Communism as foreign ideologies, an exchange of ideas between Italy and the United States nourished Italian American radical thoughts and actions. Many contributors reveal that militants looked not only to Bolshevik Russia but primarily to their native country and drew on the theoretical debate and class warfare strategies of their fellow ethnics in Italy.