Italian American Culture Research Articles

The Art of Reading Italian Americana. Italian American Culture in Review. Di Fred Gardaphé.

Leggere questa recensione di “The Art of Reading Italian Americana. Italian American Culture in Review” sara un po’ come aprire una matrioska russa; si tratta quasi di una meta-recensione, in quanto il libro di Fred Gardaphe e esso stesso una raccolta di recensioni, con l’inclusione di qualche breve saggio. Le reviews raccolte nel volumetto sono il frutto della collaborazione dell’autore con la rivista italo-americana Fra Noi tra il 1995 e il 2005.

“Guido” Culture: The Destabilization of Italian-American Identity on Jersey Shore

In this article, I explore the stereotypical representation of Italian-American identity on the MTV Networks reality television series Jersey Shore. Leaders of Italian-American organizations have voiced strong opposition to the show over concerns that the “guido” and “guidette” subculture it depicts will become synonymous, for viewers, with Italian-American identity at large. Drawing on feminist theories about gender performance as well as Italian cultural and media studies, I argue that the admittedly pejorative portrayal of Italian-American culture on Jersey Shore may nevertheless be read productively. The characterization of Guidos and Guidettes in the series suggests that the definition of Italian-American identity depends upon practices and variables that are available for appropriation. Consequently, Jersey Shore may be interpreted as challenging the possibility of a real—as opposed to constructed—Italian-American culture.

Book Review: The Art of Reading Italian Americana: Italian American Culture in Review

Book Review: The Art of Reading Italian Americana: Italian American Culture in Review

Real Presence: The <i>Numina</i> in Italian American Poetry

In an influential essay, Dana Gioia asserts: full range and quality of Italian-American poetry ... remains inadequately understood in any critical environment (n. pag.). With few exceptions, environmental literary criticism has remained indifferent to ethnic literature, in part, I suspect, because nature writing and the literature of environmental crisis is thoroughly Anglo-American; thus, when ecocritics enter multicultural discourse, tends to mean Anglo. Italian American poetry has been lost at the margins of whiteness. This is not surprising because, as scholarship in Whiteness Studies has shown, many of the peoples now considered ethnics--Ashkenazi Jews, southern Italians, the Irish--were not entirely when they arrived in the United States during the great migrations that ended in 1924. (1) The assimilation of these groups into middle-class whiteness after World War If--the creation of dark white ethnicities--has occluded the difference between immigrants and groups present during the continental phase of nation-building. (2) For American Indians, African Americans, Chicanos, and Anglo-Americans, the creation of the American was a shared, if agonistic, experience. The dramas of Emancipation, the Indian Wars, and the annexation of the Southwest coincide with the creation of nature's nation in the narrative of Manifest Destiny, the new multicultural history, and the environmentalist narratives of industrial devastation and conservationist repentance? For immigrants whose influx peaked in the early-twentieth century, however, the question of participation in these racialized histories of nature remains open. Can the narratives, plots, tropes, and aesthetic principles that drive the literature of these earlier groups account for the post-immigrant relationship to American environments? What new forms of cultural poiesis have been fashioned by the environment of diaspora, by the interchange between old and new immigrant worlds? In this essay, I will begin to answer these questions relative to Italian American poetry by considering the work of John Ciardi and Diane di Prima. If, as Josephine Gattuso Hendin asserts, [e]thnic heritage is history in action and subjects the fact of immigration to a scrutiny of its ongoing (13), it makes sense to ask what difference that heritage has made to poets who encountered the United States as a diasporic environment. To put it another way, we can scrutinize the ongoing effects of Italian heritage on American poets in their encounter with the presence, or presences, of the nonhuman world. From such an angle, we discover a striking dynamic in Ciardi's and di Prima's poetry: an encounter with the numina--divine powers the spirits of place, that founds a theophanic aesthetics quite distinct from the Emersonian transparent eyeball, in which the nature of the other is subsumed in the All; from the Dickinsonian microcosmos, in which Vesuvius is contained by the domus; and from T. S. Eliot's adventures in Indic religion, in which rivers are, necessarily, brown gods. I call this poetic principle the aesthetic of real presence because the voice of the poet arises from an encounter with a creature whose role as an instance of the divine roots the diasporic speaker in place, despite any claim of Anglo-American dominion. Real presence is, of course, a reference to the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, a Christian idea of incarnation through liturgical action. I suggest, however, that the Catholic heritage of Italian American culture can be used to talk about religious experiences that are not strictly Christian. The incarnational imperative to encounter the divine in the world of the senses through the mediation of art radiates from the official sacraments, but is not confined to them. Aisthesis, the sensory experience of the divine in or as a creature, founds ethnesis, the production and renewal of culture. The idea of the Mediterranean peasant and her/his offspring as closer to nature is not so much displaced as revealed to be an alternate origin for civilization itself. …

"Vomit Your poison": Violence, Hunger, and Symbolism in Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete

The study of food practices and patterns as well as the exploration of the regional and generational differences of preparation and in Italian American culture has been a source of much discussion among scholars in the fields of history, sociology, literature, and psychology. (1) Indeed, Italian Americans are known for and deeply proud of their connection to food, and this identification remains one of the most prominent aspects associated with their culture. Food, in its capacity to nourish and to appease physical and spiritual hunger, sustains life and faith, and becomes a compelling topic for Italian American artists to explore. In literature, as Gian-Paolo Biasin points out in The Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel, signs in gastronomy ... constitute an integral part of the technique used for representation, narration, and characterization (11). Food becomes an essential part of understanding narratives as it helps to identify how authors use various elements of fiction such as tone, setting, and conflict to create the world of the novel. For instance, traditional Italian dishes such as spaghetti covered in a thick, red sauce, dandelion salad, homemade wine, barley soup, and fried zucchini can be found in John Fante's Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), Mari Tomasi's Like Lesser Gods (1949), Don DeLillo's Take the 'A' Train (1962), Tina DeRosa's Paper Fish (1980), and Carole Maso's Ghost Dance (1986). These few examples show Italian American writers using food to illustrate socio-economic ties, cultural identity, group affiliation, and emotional expressions such as nostalgia, grief, and desire; eating these ethnic specific foods helps the characters diminish the geographical and temporal distance caused by immigration and assimilation. In his autobiographical novel Christ in Concrete (1939), proletarian writer Pietro di Donato uses food to depict the ethnic and class identity of his characters, but he also underscores the conflicted and conflicting effects cooking and have on the life of Italian immigrants in 1920s America. (2) By employing the image of food as a metaphor for self-expression, di Donato creates a discourse of food that links the physical to the spiritual and critiques social forces that simultaneously deprive and poison the working poor. America denies the Immigrant a nourishing environment in which to grow, so they must learn to struggle against oppression or suffer through it. Di Donato explores this absence of nourishment by inventing a working-class aesthetic out of the vile, vulgar image of vomit. As Pierre Bourdieu explains in Distinction, Tastes (i.e., manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other (56). Di Donato, in writing about class structure, questions the legitimacy of tastes by challenging bourgeois culture through his use of distaste, or what Bourdieu might classify as a disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance ('sick-making') of the tastes of others (56). (3) Vomiting is itself a violent act--the body rejects what it has eaten; furthermore it can be either self-induced or provoked by harmful factors, which prevents the absorption of nutrients vital for the body's survival. Vomiting stops the necessary process of ingestion and stimulates purging, the body ridding itself of what it refuses to consume. This dysfunctional consumption works against the more traditional, middle class aesthetic of beauty and taste by focusing instead on the ghastly (Gigante 36). In Christ in Concrete when the word vomit or actual vomiting appears, di Donato purposively shocks the reader and associates this distasteful image with the survival of the Italian immigrant. Vomit as a culinary sign also moves the discussion of food from simply celebrating cultural identity to showing the volatility of the immigrants' working and living conditions. …

Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture Steven J. Belluscio Fred L. Gardaphe . Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture. Albany: State U of New York P, 2004. xix + 195 pp. With his earlier work, Fred L. Gardaphe positioned himself as the foremost critic (Dagoes Read: Tradition and the Italian/American Writer, 1996), historian (Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative, 1996), columnist (Fra Noi newspaper), and anthologist (From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana, 1991) of Italian-American literature—even contributing to the tradition with Moustache Pete is Dead! (1997). With his most recent work, Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture (2004), Gardaphe has repositioned himself as a critic of Italian-American culture on the whole. This shift comes in part as a result of Gardaphe having in 1998 accepted a position at Stony Brook University, State University of New York, where he directs both the Italian/American and American Studies programs—a move that provoked a broader, even more global, approach than simply Italian-American literature. However, it also comes as a result of Gardaphe's desire to "fix just what it is about what is called Italian American into what we call America": indeed, a desire " to understand the history of America's Italians, to see where they came from, what they created, and where it is all going" (xi, xii). Gardaphe does not attempt to provide the final word on either issue. However, he very deftly leads by example, providing the reader with a number of solid readings designed to illuminate "class, race, gender, ethnicity, and lifestyle" as they operate in Italian-American culture. At the very same time, he synthesizes [End Page 228] a stunning array of scholarship on Italian-American literature, film, art, music, religion, social history, and folkways (xi). Part I, "A Historical Survey," describes the cultural origins of Italian America and provides a brief history of the scholarship devoted to its study. Chapter 1 begins with Antonio Gramsci's 1927 call for an indigenous southern Italian intelligentsia to fight oppression at the hands of the northern ruling elite. Gardaphe believes that one answer to Gramsci's Southern Question came in the form of Italian immigration, which, mostly southern, devoted itself to issues of class and politics in their writings in the United States. He cites poet/labor organizer/novelist Frances Winwar, journalist/labor organizer Carol Tresca, and literary critic Luigi Fraini as the earliest examples of this trend, arguing that the "myth of Italian America was founded [in the early twentieth century] by immigrants from southern Italy who did not wait for others to answer the southern question for them" and who "became the very intellectuals that Gramsci had hoped would lead his country in a revolution" (11–12, 12). The result was nothing short of the invention of Italian America, a subject Gardaphe turns to in chapter 2 and a task he places squarely in the hands of Italian-American writers who continually dramatized the "tension between the metaphor of Italy and the metaphor of America" in their creative work (19). Gardaphe follows this assertion with brief readings of the work of a dazzling, even dizzying, array of novelists memoirists, and poets, including John Fante, Jerre Mangione, George Panetta, Octavia Waldo, Rocco Fumento, Michael de Capite, Raymond de Capite, Giose Rimanelli, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, Mario Puzo, and Gay Talese. The scope of the discussion runs from the turn of the century to the 1960s and reveals Gardaphe's encyclopedic knowledge of the field. Chapter 3 picks up where the previous chapter had left off: the 1970s, when the so-called ethnic revival provoked a serious reconsideration of the "Little Italy" created by previous writers. Gardaphe again provides brief discussions of many writers, including Helen Barolini, Dorothy Bryant, Carole Maso, Josephine Gattuso Hendin, Dana Gioia, Rose Romano, Don de Lillo, and Albert Innaurato. Part and parcel of this reconsideration of "Little Italy" was the explosion of scholarship on Italian America that began in the 1970s. While Gardaphe astutely discusses the work of—among others—Raymond Bellioti, Anthony Tamburri, Edvige Giunta, and Mary Jo Bona, he is silent about his own above-mentioned contributions, which...

Lost and Found: The Italian-American Radical Experience

Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer, eds., The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2003), 346 pages, cloth $79.95, paper $29.95.When, almost ten years ago, I came from Italy to study in New York I was shocked by the discrepancy between Italian-American and Italian politics. To my amazement, I discovered that the left, which has always played, and still plays, an important role in Italian politics, occupies a marginal, if not nonexistent, place in Italian-American political culture. Even worse, I learned that Italian Americans are perceived as a basically conservative group, whose only ties to Italy appear to be the Mafia and food. How did Italian Americans end up identifying themselves, and being identified, with such conservative values and reactionary political forces? Why did their political consciousness diverge so markedly from their Italian counterparts?This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Frank Sinatra: history, identity, and Italian American culture

Frank Sinatra: history, identity, and Italian American culture

A Sitdown with the Sopranos: watching Italian American culture on TV's most talked-about series

A Sitdown with the Sopranos: watching Italian American culture on TV's most talked-about series

A Sitdown with the Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on T.V.'s Most Talked-about Series

A Sitdown with the Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on T.V.'s Most Talked-about Series

'We were working on an erotic song cycle': Reading Carole Maso's AVA as the Poetics of Female Italian-American Cultural and Sexual Identity

Throughout my childhood, I was brought up to be Italian and I was brought up to be American: two distinct identities not to be merged but to exist somehow simultaneously not quite one and not exactly the other, in a kind of hybrid state. But what did I know of being a real Italian? The link to my own cultural heritage has always been a tenuous one. I was purposely not taught the Italian language at home so that my mother and her sister and the other relatives could discuss family business in privacy. As a teenager, I took Italian classes at my high school and then later in college. By then, my family had mostly stopped using the language of their birth, of their distant homeland. In America you speak American. But I wanted to learn the language of la famiglia which I had thought was my link to life. The Italian that I learned at school, however, bore no relation to how my family spoke. The only Italian I now know is what I heard growing up, snatches of phrases and words which still act as an entryway to keeping my foot in the door of a lost and dying culture. These words emerge from my mind like something I cannot stop but also as something I can never seem to summon at will. I still know are pieces of the songs my mother would sing to me, and still sings to me when I come to visit: le cante d'Italia. As a child, I never found out what those songs meant, and I still haven't. I have discovered is that the language, the lyric, the song, the poetry has helped to created my sense of Italian identity as part of an ongoing experience which seems to have no complete literal American English translation. constitutes Italian-American culture for a third-generation daughter born of a second-generation parent? Like many of my generation, I searched for answers to that question by traveling to Italy to the place I thought of as my homeland. My mother had no interest in going because her grandmother, who had never come to the United States, was no longer alive. What was the point of going now, my mother said, Che via vecchia! So I went, with a friend, and saw the sights. I did not visit my grandparents' places of birth, Lucca and Sestri Levanti, where I still have many family members. I went instead to Venice and Verona and Rome. I saw the Spanish Steps and had tea at Keats's house and spoke sporadic Italian. But I saw myself there somehow. I saw the food I like to eat, the laundry I like to hand wash and let dry in the sun, and heard the music I like to listen to when I can't fall asleep. I saw the women with their thick dark hair, so much like mine, riding scooters together around the piazzas. Surely, this is my culture, too, I thought. I fantasized about living along the Mediterranean coastline, listening to opera and writing postcards back home to say how sorry I was that I was never returning because I had found my place at last. Soon I awoke from my slumber when the young Italians with whom I had encounters let me know that it was in fact not my country; they had no interest in welcoming an American, especially la turista. They resented my presence and did not see any connection at all to who I was, and what I looked liked, to who they were and where they lived and what they wanted. When I returned to the United States, I didn't feel so Italian anymore. I've been wondering ever since how to assert a non-anglo American identity, a specifically Italian one, at the same time that I know that Italy is not my home. Italian-American writers and scholars have used the term italianita to describe the vestiges of Italian culture that still persist over time and across continents for the immigrant separated from her or his home country. Scholars Anthony Tamburri, Paolo Giordano, and Fred Gardaphe articulate the particular dilemma and strategy of the third-generation Italian-American writer whose work often begins and ends from a place of cultural and artistic distance. For this generation of writers, there has been a shift in the focus of their work, a tilt in their angle of reflection, so that their [writing] becomes less a vehicle for presenting what it means to be Italian in America and more of what it means to carry the cultural trappings of italianita into their everyday American lives. …

Re]creating Italian American Historiography: Astoria and the Truth of Narrative

The Italian American image in the US has been largely shaped by media representations. Research has shown that mass media portrayals of topics like the Mafia and ethnic characters frame and package these issues, oversimplifying them and rendering a distorted view of Italian American history, culture and civilization. Movies like The Godfather have left a permanent imprint and have created a filter through which Americans 'read' Italian American culture. In order for the historiography of Italian America to reframe itself, scholars and writers must begin studying history from a dialectical perspective through which the continuity of history and sporadic moments of meaningful history lead to new creative interpretations. Vico's notion of history described in his New Science offers insights into the working of this historical dialectic. Vico postulates a history in which individual subjects identify their meaning through the understanding of their deeply embedded relationship within the culture of which they are part. The novel Astoria by Viscusi, recipient of the American Book Award in 1996, addresses the creative process of [re]creating the Italian American Narrative. In undermining the simplification of The Godfather 's saga, the novel aims to bring the reader close to a place where the stereotypes are produced, with a view to formulating new images and new notions of historical processes.

Review: Studies in Southern Italian and Italian-American Culture

Review: Studies in Southern Italian and Italian-American Culture

Dream Streets: The Big Book of Italian American Culture

Dream Streets: The Big Book of Italian American Culture

Reclaiming the Subject: Italian Women Self-Defined

In the last twenty years there have been a number of historical and sociocultural studies of Italian Americans. Few, however, have seriously addressed the female experience in the Italian American culture. Indeed, Italian American literature is so deeply immersed in a masculinist view of the Italian American culture that a female corrective to this asymmetry is not enough. Upon critically reviewing the literature, the necessity for a feminist perspective becomes obvious. Consequently, the purpose of this article is two-fold: 1) to expose some of the mythology which surrounds the image of Italian American women; and 2) to suggest a feminist framework within which future studies of Italian American women may take place.