Italian American Research Articles

Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada

Reviewed by: Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada Katherine Dugan Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. By Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 296 pp. $32.00. When Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada stepped into the basement of the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she stepped into a world where Catholic masculinity is constructed and sustained. As she argues in Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this world is "how religious men come to understand themselves and be recognized as men" (2). This Catholic manhood entails tattoos that articulate religious commitments and the work of the annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the Dance of the Giglio. Framing her intervention, Maldonado-Estrada points out that the nuances of Catholic men's lives are understudied: "[i]t is odd to say it, but laymen are largely invisible in histories of Catholic devotional life. Or they are foils, by contrast heightening the piety of women" (10). This book enters a long conversation about Catholic devotionalism, which has historically centered women's experiences. Turning to men's devotional lives, this book charts the nature of man-making devotional labor. The structure of this book moves swiftly through arguments about the locations of religious practice, the role of labor in prayer, the place of money in festivals, questions about public performance of masculinities, and analysis of gentrification and the shifting nature of [End Page 81] urban religion. Among the many contributions this text makes to Catholic studies, three are especially poignant. First, in this book, devotionalism takes place in a relatively unexplored set of registers: bodies, joking, work, men's relationships and male homosocial spaces. Maldonado-Estrada posits that the men's tattoos are "devotional objects" that mediate relationship between themselves and the divine (48). Likewise, the aesthetics of this devotionalism are such that the men embody a "devotion that allows men to transgress, to play with vibrant aesthetics . . . and white heteronormativity" (54). This expands where scholars locate devotionalism: from women's spaces to men's; from inside churches to outside; and from subdued to vibrant aesthetics. Second, Maldonado-Estrada's attention to nuances of her ethnographic method is a model. While she notes that a woman in men's spaces should not have to talk or think so much about her gendered positionality (17), the way she does unfold the layers of her own positionality offers a thoughtful contribution to questions about method. She refuses to shy away from the way her female body, her Puerto Rican identity, her ability to paint, and her willingness to joke with the men in these pages built her method. During her years of fieldwork, Maldonado-Estrada spent countless hours building ethnographic relationships with the men who constitute the "lifeblood" (210) of this festival. This is how she "made real friendships that exceed the language of methodology" and "became a woman researcher who belonged in the masculine spaces of the feast" (104). The craft and style of her self-reflective negotiations enrich the work. Third, Lifeblood of the Parish is also a portrait of the shifting landscape of urban Catholicism in the early twenty-first century. This is about gentrification, changing parish demographics, and an urban Catholicism that is tied to Italian practices. When Maldonado-Estrada turns her descriptive eye to what she calls "public masculinity" (143) on display in the feast, she argues that the "muscle" of the Dance of the Giglio facilitates a normative heterosexuality through homosocial spaces (163). That space asserts a particular interpretation of Italian American identity onto the streets of Williamsburg—even among the changing demographics of the neighborhood (209). The focus on laymen's lives addresses a significant lacuna in Catholic studies. Maldonado-Estrada's decision to focus on masculinities is an important intervention: we all know women are around the edges of these men's devotional lives, but that is where they remain for the men in this book. This is a book and a story about men's lives, marked as men—the accompanying women fall outside the frame...

Samuele F. S. Pardini. In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen

Samuele F. S. Pardini. In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen

Nationalism and nation-building in the dietary consumption of Italian migrants in the United States: a transnational perspective

This article employs a transnational perspective to examine the relationship between food and drink consumption by Italians in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Italy's process of nation-building. The phenomena of emigration and colonisation were often interlinked, especially after Italy's defeat at Adua, Ethiopia, in 1896. This threw prime minister Francesco Crispi's form of colonialism into crisis and launched a different approach, based on the creation of a ‘Greater Italy’: a sort of Commonwealth based on cultural and economic ties between the Kingdom of Italy and Italian communities abroad. They were asked to be the bridgehead for Italy's economic and cultural expansion by consuming its exports, especially food and drink products. This required the development of shared feelings of national belonging among the emigrants, by breaking down the local identities that still prevailed and were particularly evident in the sphere of diet, as well as in religion, social life and language. The article analyses the promotional material that reflected the drive to foster Italian national sentiment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which helped to create an Italy both within and outside national borders.

Whom We Shall Welcome: Italian Americans and Immigration Reform, 1945–1965

Whom We Shall Welcome: Italian Americans and Immigration Reform, 1945–1965

Italian American Pentecostalism and the Struggle for Religious Identity, by Paul J. Palma

Italian American Pentecostalism and the Struggle for Religious Identity, by Paul J. Palma

Whom We Shall Welcome: Italian Americans and Immigration Reform, 1945–1965

Whom We Shall Welcome: Italian Americans and Immigration Reform, 1945–1965

In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen

In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen

From Rural Miseria to Urban Repression: Environmental Injustice and Eco-Nostalgia in Italian American History and Literature

Research Article| July 01 2020 From Rural Miseria to Urban Repression: Environmental Injustice and Eco-Nostalgia in Italian American History and Literature Sienna Hopkins Sienna Hopkins SIENNA HOPKINS holds a PhD in Italian literature from UCLA. She currently teaches Italian language, culture, history, and comparative literature at California State University, Long Beach. Her areas of research are Italian Renaissance biography, Italian American history and literature, migration studies, ecocriticism, and gender studies. Her courses include “The Italian American Experience,” “Reading between the Lines: Analyzing Italian Literature, Love and Death in Italian Literature 1300-1800,” “Nation, Self, and Psyche in Italian Literature 1800-Present,” and “La Dolce Vita: Italian Culture Through the Centuries.” In 2012-2013 she was visiting assistant professor of Italian at Pepperdine University, where her courses included “Italian Literature Through Film, Italian Theater, and Italian Culture.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Italian American Review (2020) 10 (2): 114–147. https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.2.0114 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sienna Hopkins; From Rural Miseria to Urban Repression: Environmental Injustice and Eco-Nostalgia in Italian American History and Literature. Italian American Review 1 January 2020; 10 (2): 114–147. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.2.0114 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressItalian American Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Francesco Durante: The Road to America

Research Article| July 01 2020 Francesco Durante: The Road to America Martino Marazzi; Martino Marazzi MARTINO MARAZZI teaches Italian literature at the University of Milan and has been Tiro a Segno Visiting Professor in Italian American Culture at New York University and a fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. His most recent books are Italexit: Saggi su Risorgimento e disunione nazionale (Cesati, 2019); Danteum: Studi sul Dante imperiale del Novecento (Cesati, 2015); Voices of Italian America: A History of Early Italian American Literature with a Critical Anthology (Fordham University Press 2012); and A occhi aperti: Letteratura dell’emigrazione e mito americano (FrancoAngeli, 2011). He is also the author of two novels, Sbagli (Castelvecchi, 2019) and La finta (Nerosubianco, 2015), and of two collections of short stories, La fine del Purgatorio and Filogenesi (Sedizioni, 2008 and 2010). His nonfiction essay “Amelia” in The Carolina Quarterly (2016) was included in The Best American Essays 2017 (Mariner, 2017). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Siân Gibby Siân Gibby Translated by, Translator Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Italian American Review (2020) 10 (2): 171–179. https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.2.0171 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Martino Marazzi, Siân Gibby; Francesco Durante: The Road to America. Italian American Review 1 January 2020; 10 (2): 171–179. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.2.0171 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressItalian American Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Guido Culture and Italian American Youth: From Bensonhurst to Jersey Shore

Guido Culture and Italian American Youth: From Bensonhurst to Jersey Shore

Editor’s Farewell

Other| July 01 2020 Editor’s Farewell Marcella Bencivenni Marcella Bencivenni Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Italian American Review (2020) 10 (2): 111–113. https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.2.0111 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Marcella Bencivenni; Editor’s Farewell. Italian American Review 1 January 2020; 10 (2): 111–113. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.2.0111 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressItalian American Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Italian American Women, Food, and Identity: Stories at the Table

Italian American Women, Food, and Identity: Stories at the Table

Hollywood’s Depiction of Italian American Servicemen During the Italian Campaign of World War II

This article analyzes the portrayal of Italian American servicemen in Hollywood films set in Italy during the Italian Campaign of World War II (1943-1945) and produced from the time of the war to the present. Addressing this widely overlooked theme, the study shows how the American film industry perceived and represented one of the largest ethnic groups in the US forces, who were deployed to liberate their ancestral country from Axis control. Special attention is paid to representations of the servicemen's relationship with the Italian population and to their expressions of American patriotism.

“They Go By The Moon”: An Anthropological Perspective on Home Winemaking among Italian Americans in Boston

This essay illustrates how Italian American home winemaking in Boston, Massachusetts, may be used as a lens with which to view aspects of cultural patrimony within the Italian American cultural experience.

Comparing the Italian and North American prospective registries on penile prosthesis surgery: are there relevant differences in treatment indications and patients' management?

Previous studies have shown discrepancies among countries in terms of treatment indications and patients' management due to different health care policies. Penile prosthesis implantation (PPI) is a highly effective treatment for erectile dysfunction (ED), which may have different accessibility according to the type of health system. We compared clinical characteristics of patients included in two national registries on PPI to investigate the influence of different health care systems on treatment indication and accessibility. The multicenter Italian Nationwide Systematic Inventarization of Surgical Treatment for ED (INSIST-ED) Registry and the multicenter Prospective Registry of Outcomes with Penile Prosthesis for Erectile Restoration (PROPPER), respectively for Italy and North America were considered. Clinical characteristics of patients included in both registries were compared using Wilcoxon Rank Sum test and the Pearson's Chi square test. Patients submitted to PPI in Italy are significantly younger (age: 61.2 vs. 63.8 years; p ≤ 0.001) compared with North America. The majority of patients are treated for post-radical prostatectomy ED in both registries (Italy: 31%; North America: 27%), although diabetes and cardiovascular diseases are more frequent reasons for PPI in the PROPPER registry (p ≤ 0.001), reflecting differences in disease prevalence among countries. In North America a non-hydraulic implant is considered only in 1% of cases as compared with 3% in Italy (p ≤ 0.001). In terms of postoperative management, a compressive surgical dressing (98% vs. 24%; p ≤ 0.001) is a more common strategy in North America. Finally, in Italy most surgeries are performed in a public hospital (82%), while the private setting (70.8%) is more common in North America (p ≤ 0.001). These findings suggest differences in health care systems between Italy and North America. A system like the American one would guarantee easier access to PPI in countries where the National Health System is mainly based on reimbursement to public hospital settings and where patients choosing private settings have to pay by themselves.

Fascists at the Fair: Political Resistance at the 1933–1934 Chicago World's Fair

AbstractAt the 1933–1934 World's Fair in Chicago the local German American population was able to organize some resistance to minimize the Nazi presence on the fairgrounds, while Italian Americans, for their part, were held in check by the close oversight of Fascist Italy's representatives at the Fair. Neither the Fairs organizing committee nor the U.S. State Department offered any objection to either governments presence. The history of the event shows that these differences were fundamentally due to international regulations surrounding international expositions, suggesting that our existing approaches toward meaning‐making and political action at mega‐events need to take better account of larger regulatory structures.

A Hero and His Newspaper: Unsettling Myths of Italian America

AbstractItalian American ethnic identity has long been constituted by struggles and inequalities endured by Italians in post-unification rural Italy and their subsequent racialized oppression in urban centers of the US North in the era of mass migration. Until now, the presumed stability of mass migration identity has created the general terms for understanding Italian America. In this essay, a New Orleans microhistory illuminated through the 1849 newspaper Il Monitore del Sud, the first Italian-language newspaper published in the United States, reshapes foundational understandings of Italian American identity. The newspaper's antebellum account of New Orleans Italian America includes nationalist aesthetic expressions and political affiliations that American political discourse has not yet found an adequate language to describe and that Italian American studies has not yet confronted. In bringing this prehistory to light, my work with antebellum Italian Americans complicates understandings of multi-ethnic collectivity by examining how intercultural myth-making underwrites communal historiography. Together, the ethnic perceptions memorialized in Il Monitore del Sud and the power operations revealed in concurrent civic records expose how collective conditions of white supremacy come to be naturalized and forgotten, becoming history's flotsam. The creation of Italian America's communal historiography, I argue, shows us something larger about the operations of US white supremacy: how its emotional logic depends simultaneously on the exploitation of vulnerable others and the enactment of vulnerability from within the exploiting group.

The Making of the Italian American Colonizer

This essay investigates how the Fascist war in Ethiopia influenced the racial representation and self-perception of Italian immigrants living in the United States. In particular, it analyzes how the regime exported new narratives depicting the migrant as a colonizer and how these stories informed the way in which Italian Americans perceived their ethnic and racial identity. Because the regime identified Italian emigrants as members of a superior race, news about the Italo-Ethiopian war had a strong impact on their relationship with African Americans, who conceived of Ethiopia as a symbol of Pan-African independence and thus regarded the conflict as a race war. By showing how colonialism and its propaganda may influence not only colonized peoples but also subaltern groups and communities living in geographically distant areas, the present essay hopes to contribute to the postcolonial discourse with an innovative perspective.

A investigação criminal direta pela defesa – instrumento de qualificação do debate probatório na relação processual penal

O presente artigo examina a investigação criminal defensiva no sistema jurídico brasileiro como um instrumento necessário à qualificação da atividade probatória defensiva no processo penal. Apesar da falta de regulamentação normativa da possibilidade de busca de elementos de formação do convencimento pela defesa, o presente estudo demonstra o potencial do processo penal brasileiro a partir da experiência italiana e norte-americana e a recente regulamentação através de normativa OAB.

Italian-American Literature: Respected?

Italian-American Literature: Respected?