Italian American Research Articles

Nicola Cacciatore. Italian Partisans and British Forces in the Second World War: Working with the Enemy Italian and Italian American Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. 248. $129.99 (cloth).

Nicola Cacciatore. Italian Partisans and British Forces in the Second World War: Working with the Enemy Italian and Italian American Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. 248. $129.99 (cloth).

Louis P. DeFilippo: An Italian American Football Coach

Louis P. DeFilippo: An Italian American Football Coach

Civil Rights, Fascism’s Legacy, and Italian American Material Culture in Scorsese’s Mean Streets

This essay offers a material culture reading of Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film, Mean Streets, highlighting how the film narrates not only a small-time criminal gang in working-class New York City but a decidedly Italian American one, caught within a specific time and place. The film, emphasizing a neorealist style, is full of visual reminders of the ways objects—the things of everyday life—inform and reflect the lived experiences of an ethnic community, one that is alive, changing, and resilient, even as it may seem to possess, and almost embrace, a closed and stagnant sense of itself. In particular, I focus on what I refer to as “silent presences” in the film, especially around the Italian-American Civil Rights League of the 1970s and a legacy of Fascism. In so doing, I demonstrate how the characters’ layered prejudices and ethnic boosterism are in part defined by and defining the setting of the film in a manner that ultimately keeps those same characters away from assimilation in a time period when their neighborhood is changing. Focusing on the objects and materiality that structures the film’s setting helps illustrate how the characters react against change, against wholesale assimilation, retaining and reshaping Italian American identity along the way.

Roseto effect: An Italian-American version of the French paradox?

Clinicians worldwide continually have to respond to questions about the potential benefits on health from the moderate consumption of alcohol, and the “French paradox” has often been cited as supporting this premise. We wish to briefly comment on findings from the last several decades that provide evidence that moderate drinking may have some beneficial health effects, starting with a new analysis of the observation of “Unusually Low Incidence of Death From Myocardial Infarction” – a study of an Italian American community in Pennsylvania published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1964.

Edward Corsi's La Settimana: Italianità as a guiding principle of progress in a new land

This article explores how the Italian American bilingual weekly La Settimana, which ran from December 1935 to November 1937, represented an excellent platform not only to promote the extraordinary achievements of Italians in America, but also to educate its wide readership about the need to be more united, more focused in their aims, and more respectful and understanding of the values of culture. This article examines the weekly in light of the belief advocated by its founder, Edward Corsi, that the Italian American communities needed a much higher quality of journalism that reflected and followed the progress of the Italians in America, particularly those of the second and third generations, and to stimulate their interest in American life and its institutions, while stressing the importance of their Italian heritage and language. The essay also addresses La Settimana's benevolent attitude toward Mussolini and his leadership within the context of the weekly's promotion of italianità.

The Bear: New (stereotypical) representations of Italian Americans in contemporary television series

This article investigates the representations of Italian Americans in the successful TV series The Bear (2022–), following Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and Alan J Gravano's innovative critical framework according to which the field of Italian American cinema, TV and media studies needs to go beyond the strict notion of ethnicity and be, instead, reconsidered as an intersectional area including issues as class, gender, sexuality, power and production. The Bear portrays Carmen (‘Carmy’) Berzatto, a young top chef who returns to his hometown of Chicago to take over his family's Italian sandwich shop and who is living through an emotional breakdown because of his brother's death. The series received great praise for its ground-breaking narration style and nonconformist characters. Still, while the narrative arc of the series does not focus on the Italian roots of the protagonist and his family, many of the climatic moments recurrently exploit the commonplace repertoire of Italian American type: loud, quickly bursting into fits of rage, family obsessed, food enthusiast, somehow involved in dirty business. This analysis will explore how, in this contemporary depiction of Italian Americans, the author paradoxically departs and at the same time relies on the stereotypical dominant cliche usually employed for these characters. As a result, a transitional narration emerges, portraying figures precariously balancing between innovation and conservatism. With a discursive approach, this article will examine how The Bear follows this contradictory pattern, seemingly dismissing crystalized representational myths of Italian descent in the USA and simultaneously validating them.

EEthnicity: Social media, Italian Americans, and Cultural Identity

This study seeks to determine the relationship between social media and various generations of the Italian American community. It also aims to understand if various types of social media posts affect Italian Americans differently depending on their age. Presenting social media as a new host culture for Italian Americans where their ethnic identity serves as their primary point of reference as they navigate the digital world, this study also attempts to determine exactly how effective social media can be seen as a tool for discovering and learning more about one’s ethnic heritage. This study was performed via a quantitative survey of 110 respondents, with certain results analyzed via both chi-square tests of independence and Pearson correlation coefficients. Study outcomes assert that an individual’s self-concept is built on cultural, social, and personal identities, with all three working together to form a person’s overall identity. Survey respondents showed a strong cultural tie to their Italian American heritage that affected their personal identity to the point where they felt it was necessary to seek out Italian American-related content on social media. By participating in Italian American social media sites as either a fan or consumer of content, the respondents showed a social identity in which their cultural and personal identities play a defining role. The respondents’ cultural identity was used as the social context within which they operate, showing that it does influence how they interact with social media content.

Global journal publishing, soft power, Italian Americans and social media visual impact

Global journal publishing, soft power, Italian Americans and social media visual impact

Hashtags and heritage: the use of #italianamerican on Instagram

Abstract Purpose Using both framing theory and Collier’s cultural identity theory, this paper seeks to study the use of #italianamerican on Instagram by first attempting to determine if it is used exclusively by Italian Americans as a way to demonstrate their own cultural identity. The paper will then examine whether the message valence of posts using #italianamerican demonstrates users’ personal perceptions of Italian American culture. Finally, the paper will examine if there is a relationship between #italianamerican posters’ ethnicity and the message valence of their posts. This paper does not argue that Italian Americans are the only Americans of European ancestry taking part in the hashtag phenomenon; rather, this paper is meant to examine how one ethnic group attempts to define itself by its use of digital and social media. Design/methodology This simple exploratory study examined the 50 most recent Instagram posts using #italianamerican as they appeared on November 1, 2022. The posts were sent to two independent coders who analyzed their visual content. Findings This study provides insight into how ethnicity and cultural familiarity are associated. Results show that message valence and ethnicity are not linked, as anyone can admire and respect a culture and post a positive message about it on social media, even if it is not their culture of origin. Members of a specific ethnic group tend to have a stronger familiarity with their culture of origin, as demonstrated by the posts selected for this study. Implications This study showed that Italian Americans use social media to educate others about their heritage, as well as to celebrate their culture of origin. Value The methods used in this study could be applied to other European American ethnic groups and their social media usage, including Irish Americans, Polish Americans, and German Americans, among others.

Constructing collective memory through a documentary. The case of “The Italian Americans” (PBS, 2015)

Constructing collective memory through a documentary. The case of “The Italian Americans” (PBS, 2015)

Don(n)ing Italian American Ethnicity: Digital Space, Ethnic Performance, and Textual Evolution in The Godfather Video Game

Abstract Electronic Arts’ The Godfather: The Game uses Mario Puzo's novel and Francis Ford Coppola's films as the raw material for new representations of Italian American ethnicity. In the game, viewers design their avatar. Unusual in the world of game design, this interface, dubbed “Mob Face,” limits players’ choices to narrow, stereotypically Italian American male physiognomy. After choosing everything from physical features to clothing, the player enters the game space as an in-group member of the Corleone Italian American crime family. The game's rules further complicate this construction of ethnicity by requiring players to engage in acts of violence and extortion in order for the narrative to progress. Despite reminders that players are not really Italian American gangsters, the game's design romanticizes regressive masculine norms and offers a fantasy of an all-powerful, exclusively White ethnic, male group creating troubling notions of ethnic, racial, and gender identities. Ultimately, The Godfather: The Game reframes not only the original text(s) on which it is based but also the meaning of Italian American ethnicity (and, by extension, other identity categories) in a digital space.

Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation ed. by Yiorgos Anagnostou, Yiorgos Kalogeras and Theodora Patrona (review)

Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation ed. by Yiorgos Anagnostou, Yiorgos Kalogeras and Theodora Patrona (review)

Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation

Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation

From Grinder to Nipper: Opera, Music Technology and Italian American (Self-)Representation

AbstractIn this article I argue that the longstanding practice of depicting Italian Americans as opera lovers stems from a tradition associating Italian immigrants with mechanical music devices. As a growing number of Italian unskilled labourers entered the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were stereotyped as street musicians, and especially as organ grinders, in mainstream popular culture. Beginning in the 1900s, recording manufacturers strove to make home phonographs appealing to the middle class by breaking the chain of mechanical, social and racial associations that connected the phonograph with earlier musical devices such as the barrel organ, and with those who played them. Because of the prominent marketing role that record labels assigned to Italian opera, this commercial strategy had important consequences for the genre as well as for Italian immigrants, who leveraged opera's renewed visibility and audibility into an effective vessel for social and political empowerment.

Italian Americans on Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future

Italian Americans on Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future

Italian American Pentecostalism and the Struggle for Religious Identity

Italian American Pentecostalism and the Struggle for Religious Identity

A Victorian taste of Italy: Situating the “Italian-Swiss Colony” in California wine culture

The article focuses on Andrea Sbarboro's (1839–1923) Italian-Swiss Colony of Asti in Sonoma County and the success of his winemaking company created in 1881. By exploring the relationship between the symbolic space of the vineyard (which I refer to as a ‘winescape’) and the predominant racial narratives of the time in California, I argue that Sbarboro created an Italian space in which Italian Americans could be recognized as ‘white.’ Sbarboro's representations of winemaking as a tradition rooted in Greek/Roman civilization appealed to a Victorian cultural elite that intended to project a Classical and imperialist aesthetic into California. Even today, it is still possible to find in Sonoma and Napa Valley Italian American winemakers that link their business to a similar aesthetic with the unintended result of excising from the landscape non-white contributions to the history of winemaking in California.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Woman on the Threshold: Patterns of Liminality and Communitas in Giovanna Capone’s In My Neighborhood

This contribution carries out a spatial analysis of the short stories and poems collected in Giovanna Capone’s In My Neighborhood (2014), with a twofold aim: exploring the significance of physical and metaphorical liminalities in the development of Capone’s poetics and, on a more theoretical level, outlining an alternative paradigm, based on the concepts of liminality and communitas, to read Capone’s poetry, as well as other contemporary Italian-American literary texts. I identify four sites of liminality in Capone’s work and delve into their relationship with the narrative voice and the role they play in its evolution. This essay reflects on Giovanna Capone’s Bildung and her identity as a queer Italian-American author by re-reading the four spaces described in In My Neighborhood through the lens of Victor Turner’s theory of liminality and Roberto Esposito’s notion of communitas. Esposito’s development of the concept allows for an alternative interpretation of the community of Italian American queer subjectivities created by Capone in the Southwest. Finally, the connection of such community with Gloria Anzaldúa’s formulation of Borderland and ‘mestiza consciousness’ is highlighted as a theoretical counternarrative to the identification of the ethnic queer self as a member of a community defined by borders.

Place and transmemory in California Italian American literary narratives: Dorothy Bryant's Miss Giardino

In this article, I propose to think of spaces as sites of production and manifestation of memory, which, in turn, constitutes a transnational formation, one that can hardly be discursively fixed. In particular, my analysis of Dorothy Bryant's 1978 novel Miss Giardino uncovers how transmemory, or the intergenerational transmission of memory from diasporic to ethnic subjects, complicates ideas of Italian belonging. I turn to the study of space, with an emphasis on the multiethnic neighborhood of The Mission, in the east-central part of San Francisco, to address the mediation between Italian diasporic past and interethnic present. While acknowledging that forms of inherited memory (or postmemory), such as class memory, affect the social practice of place intergenerationally, I also aim to show that in transmemory spaces are made differently meaningful. Ultimately, reframing spaces of Italian migrations through the lens of transmemory offers a way to move us forward from impasses in Transnational Italian Studies and diaspora debates that assign to memory an overly static and national paradigm.

Strategies for Patients With Sarcomas & Merkel Cell Carcinoma

Strategies for Patients With Sarcomas & Merkel Cell Carcinoma