Chapitre 2 – L’immigration / Immigration
Along the Edges of Ethnicity: Intimacy, Love, and Italian Americans in Media
p. 33-58
Texte intégral
“I hear he’s got a foreign name… let’s ship him back from where he came from.”
Johnny Staccato, “A Nice Little Town”, 1960
1This essay begins with a rather simple premise: Given that modern Italy is a nation of migrants and given the strong impact of consumer culture and popular media, studying aspects of that culture with respect to Italian migration could help elaborate a more nuanced understanding of Italian ethnicity broadly understood. Beyond this rather facile observation this essay focuses on the history of Italian immigration to the United States and the complex relationship Italian Americans have to mediated representations, concentrating mainly on film, with gestures to other kinds of media. I consider briefly the historical development and the on-going role of stereotypes about Italian Americans and I reflect on where and how we might look for alternative media narratives about Italian ethnicity in the United States, concluding with a sustained analysis of two cinematic examples.
2Even before the modern Italian state was founded in 1861 or unified in 1871, emigrants were leaving (the mostly Northern regions of) what came to be shaped as Italy. The Italian diaspora has been growing ever since, with no sign of stopping. Italians have migrated to a multitude of destinations: internally within the peninsula (moving South to North), to inter-European locations (Belgium, Germany), and well beyond (Argentina, Australia, Canada). At the same time, more and more people continue arriving on Italy’s shores as new migrants, thus further complicating the notion of Italy and Italian identity vis-à-vis migration experiences.
3Between 1869 and 2005 over 25 million people left Italy to work and live elsewhere.1 Focusing on the U.S., the first discriminate waves of migrants to the United States came from the Veneto and Friuli regions, but the great wave of Italian immigration to the United States, which took place between 1880 and 1924, saw about five million, mostly Southerners, emigrating. With their long history of exploitation and disenfranchisement, these mainly poor and illiterate, landless peasants were pushed out of limited possibilities in Italy and pulled to the myth of the American Dream. Importantly, a high number of Italian immigrants of this era were “birds of passage” – men who traveled back and forth across the Atlantic sometimes even seasonally. In fact, the majority of Italians who migrated to the United States in this period had no intention of remaining there permanently.2 A number of factors reduced immigration to the United States starting in the 1920s (some of the most obvious reasons include: the U.S.’s discriminatory immigration laws, the Great Depression, and the influence of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who encouraged immigrants to return and made it difficult for others to leave); nevertheless Italians continued to leave and to arrive on U.S. soil, as well as many other destinations. World War II mostly put a halt to migration from Italy, although some refugees left in that time. The immediate post-World War II decades saw upwards of half a million Italians immigrating to the United States, constituting a smaller but still influential wave of immigration.3 Today Italians continue to emigrate, primarily due to economic reasons although the under-educated, disenfranchised immigrants of the early twentieth century have by and large been replaced by the highly educated professional migrants of the early twenty-first century.
4These various migration trajectories are deeply tied up with the often-racialized class prejudice which created, and still creates, a distinction between Southerners and Northerners in Italy as well as other kinds of distinctions, such as between rural peasants and urban proletariats. Migrants, and the ideas, objects, and experiences they carry with them, journey and settle with these distinctions; and those same distinctions in turn inform how the diaspora is reflected in everyday experiences as well as creative expressions, including cinema and other consumer-friendly media. In addition, already politically-strained notions around gender, race, class, and identity have taken on even more complexity with the advent, beginning in the late 1970s, of Italy as a “destination country” for new immigrants who see Italy as an economically viable, adoptive country.4 That the current waves of new immigrants to Italy (and their children, including those who were born and raised in Italy) are also connected not only to Italy’s on-going story of emigration but also its history of colonialism and Fascism cannot be under-stated either.5 Moreover, contemporary refugees and immigrants to Italy (and, it is important to reiterate, their Italian-born children) are faced with increased xenophobia on the streets, reinforced by anti-immigrant institutional policies and laws, supported by a vehemently and explicitly anti-immigrant government. These various threads of Italian motilities have been reflected in the consumer-friendly culture of film and other popular media, creating a tapestry of Italian identity which this essay, with its focus on the United States, only in part unravels.
5I am interested in an evaluation of the politics of representing Italian migration to the United States, especially in relation to historical and contemporary commonplace views on the topic. My goal is to engage a varied set of critical and technical tools for unpacking how an Italian culture of migration and Italian ethnicity is mediated in U.S-produced film and other visual-cultural consumer forms. I am concerned, for one, with exploring how iconic and often stereotypical imagery associated with Italian migration – organized crime, family, religion, food, etc. – can be both hackneyed and commodified while at other times alternatively used to suggest new, hybrid ethnic identities. When looking at U.S. films around the theme of Italian migration my focus is on representation, recognizing that films always offer audiences what Ella Shoat and Robert Stam have noted is a “‘sense of the real’ rooted in their own social experience”6 but that only through an historically grounded cultural analysis can we recognize most completely how that sense of reality is interpreted, reassessed, deconstructed, or otherwise influenced by and taken in by viewers.
6Elsewhere I have discussed the usefulness of Antonio Gramsci’s theories for offering a nuanced analysis of Italian transnational culture given his emphasis on the under-represented.7 In particular, Gramsci’s writing on subaltern culture and hegemony recognizes how the “specifics of everyday life and aspects of vernacular culture are important to a thorough understanding of cultural hegemony and hidden forms of resistance”.8 The relationship individuals and communities have both to mass-produced cultural products, such as film, as well as to quotidian domestic practices, all inform ethnic identities. In terms of cinema, such an approach allows us to look for what I propose to call here the edges of ethnicity, the borders where ethnic identity lies. In film and television, ethnicity tends to be either self-defined in some explicit way or ascribed in sometimes more ambiguous ways by, for instance, association with a stereotype. Such ambiguous ethnic shaping relies in great part on an audience who can quickly catch often-hackneyed codes. We know the potential pitfalls and benefits of relying on stereotypes, but what happens when the codes are not obvious or are barely there at all? Such edges, not always easily visible, potentially offer us complex renderings of what otherwise are often received as static formations of ethnic identities or those identities that are not even recognized at all as ethnic. Put simply, thinking about the “edges of ethnicity” encourages us to look at images that move beyond rigid stereotypes as well as at those images that have often not been received by audiences or scholars alike as ethnic.9
7My use of this phrase informs my approach in this essay but it remains conceptual and suggestive at best. I am reminded of Roland Barthes’ classic The Pleasure of the Text, where he notes: “is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes? … the intermittence of skin flashing…”10 For me, in the intermittence of ethnicity, where ethnicity “recurs as an edge,”11 we might recuperate mediated images both by moving beyond trite imagery and references and by recognizing the fluid nature of any ethnic identity. In both cases, this methodology opens scholars to cultural texts that are not always considered in standard narratives about Italian ethnicity. Such an approach also helps us consider how ethnic identity works within mainstream modes of production as it encourages us to recognize alternative stories or practices that may be present even in the most dominant ideological articulations or, for that matter, when the opposite occurs. Put another way, the edge can be used as a model for cultural recuperation: “Gramsci’s insistence on a national popular culture based on the lives of the subaltern classes suggests the need for strategies that can recognize when culture is pressed into the service of the nation-state and thus fails to legitimate the experience of the subalterns.”12
8This paper is divided into three interconnected sections. To begin, I offer a broad historical overview of some of the major trends in how Italian migration to the United States has been reimagined in U.S. film and television. Rather than a comprehensive overview, mine is directed so as to illuminate the presence of Italian Americans as white ethnics, that is, as a differentiated cultural group within a multicultural, multiracial and rapidly changing globalized nation-state. Second, I present a set of arguments on the power and social function of stereotypes of Italian Americans. I argue that the Italian American-as-gangster stereotype is a privileged ethnic stereotype, one that does not readily translate in contemporary times to victimization or discrimination. Finally, I move to a directed reading of two films not often considered by scholars invested in Italian American cultural histories, Richard Quine’s Full of Life (1956) and Robert Mulligan’s Love with a Proper Stranger (1963), but that in fact abound with Italian ethnic themes and imagery. I argue that these films’ approaches to issues of intimacy, love, and family dismantle clichéd and facile renderings of Italian American identities (especially around the overused trope of the Italian American family) and thus offer us examples of how the edges of ethnicity might be understood within mediated representations.
U.S. Mass Media and the Making of Italian Americans
9Italian Americans have long had a complicated relationship to consumer-produced media. As Anthony J. Tamburri has written: “Italian Americans occupy a strong, if often contested, place in American media.”13 Indeed, looking briefly at the first few decades of filmmaking, we can trace the development of a stereotypical imagery of Italian immigrants and their families. These cinematic images were adaptations of those first seen in print (e.g., political cartoons) and other illustrated outlets and similar to what will later be heard on radio and visible in television, the Internet, and other forms of mass media. At the same time, we can also easily note an early presence of Italian American artists, artisans, musicians, performers, and other kinds of entertainers who worked in live theater venues and in the burgeoning film industry – together they countered and contradicted stagnant images while also changing and fortifying them. The notion that early twentieth century Italian immigrants could be at once made into symbolic referents for the rampant anti-immigrant xenophobia in the United States while at the same time be great participants in the world of entertainment is central to a nuanced understanding of the historiography of transnational Italian performers.14
10Photographers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, who captured images of Italian immigrants during the peak of Italian migration to the United States, helped develop and reinforce dominant, sometimes contradictory, ideas about immigrants generally, and Italian immigrants and their descendants specifically. Italian immigrant communities in this era were seen simultaneously as exotic, ignorant, innocent, and unusual, as well as a group to be feared.15 Such photographs reflected the idea that Italian Americans were poor and rather unassimilable, unable or unwilling to do much to change their lot: Their living spaces were crowded and filthy; they were dubious in moral character and potentially threatening to the public good; and they did not take care of their children, who could be seen wandering the streets unattended or working in sweatshops rather than in school. Moreover, they participated in a number of everyday practices around domesticity, faith, and community that marked them as outside of the dominant norms of white, mainstream America.16 Italians were also associated with notions of the picturesque which both further racialized them as Other while redeeming them as absorbable into U.S. society, unlike more disenfranchised communities of color, such as Chinese immigrants or African-Americans.17 Silent cinema (e.g., Wallace McCutcheon’s 1906 The Black Hand, Reginald Barker’s 1915 The Italian) reinforced many of these ideas but especially the notion that Italian immigrants were criminally suspect or otherwise outside of mainstream society. At the same time, Italian immigrant Rudolf Valentino became a significant silent film star in Hollywood, practically single-handedly creating the stereotype of the Latin Lover and thus paving the way for further mediated clichés of Italians and Italian Americans as exotic and promiscuous, even though Valentino’s popular image was not constructed from Italian immigrant filmic characters.18 Even the acting work of Tina Modotti, better known as a photographer, reinforced the idea of an Italian immigrant as a strange and wanton character. While she only acted in a few films, Modotti’s role as the protagonist in Roy Clements’s 1920 The Tiger’s Coat reveals a performance where, as Giuliana Muscio suggests, her body became the “object of the gaze and desire of WASP audiences.”19
11These various characterizations influenced the social and cultural reception of Italian Americans throughout the United States, aiding in at times broader overall prejudice and strategic discrimination of Italian Americans.20 A number of highly public cases succinctly illustrate the cruel realities of such prejudice in the United States: The lynching of eleven Sicilian men in New Orleans in 1891, the unfair conviction and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the 1920s, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 which targeted Italians and other immigrant groups, and the xenophobic enemy alien restrictions on Japanese, Italians, and Germans in the United States during World War II.21 Countless realities of other kinds of physical brutalities and vehement prejudices against Italian Americans through the first half of the twentieth century continue to be researched and recounted by scholars, authors, and artists alike.
12The anti-Italian prejudice of the turn of the last century can be correlated with the understanding that Italians in the United States lived within a liminal white identity: at once legally “white on arrival,”22 but at the same time functionally not always considered white enough, or rather seen as what Matthew Frye Jacobson has described as “provisional or probationary whites.”23 Italian Americans, in fact, retained this ambiguous racial experience for many decades.24 Consumer-friendly media and culture have strengthened and reflected this ambiguity, most prominently in their representations of gangster life. Media that reinforces the correlation between Italian Americans and organized crime adds to the racial ambiguity by creating appealing, glorified characters who act in ways that keep them outside of mainstream society.25
13Significantly, Italian regional differences that accompanied migrating men, women, and children highly influenced the U.S. popular images and assumptions about Italian immigrants once they arrived. In such a way, the stereotypes in media in many cases stemmed from discriminatory differences felt within Italy itself, especially vis-à-vis assumed distinctions between the North and the South.26 The nationalist project of the Risorgimento constructed and reinforced a racialized hierarchy that placed Northerners above Southerners, setting up a colonial-style relationship that privileged the North and situated the South – seen as economically, politically, and culturally limited and ineffectual – as a troubled area for the development of a modern nation-state. This unbalance – often encapsulated in the term The Southern Question – is mobile and transferred to how Italian immigrants at the turn of the last century were seen upon arrival, placing them as culturally, if not racially, inferior to the mainstream Anglo-Protestant culture of the United States: “Since most Italian immigrants had come from Southern Italy during the late nineteenth century, the negative judgment that lumped together all the natives of these particular regions was quickly extended to include all the inhabitants of the peninsula.”27
14While in the first part of the twentieth century, Italian Americans lived an ambiguously white existence, this racialization changed over time.28 Imagery associated with Italian Americans evolved over the course of the century as Italian Americans were both received and understood as different by the general U.S. public, paralleling the changing mainstream attitudes towards Italian Americans, especially with respect to race. Consider the predominance of Italian Americans associated with urban criminality found in the 1930s Hollywood gangster films, e.g., Howard Hawks’ 1932 Scarface, Mervyn LeRoy’s 1931 Little Caesar. And yet, by the years following World War II, Italian Americans were still associated with organized crime even as they were more squarely accepted by dominant U.S. society as fully white on all counts as they themselves also bought into this white status. This shift in identity developed from an increase in the Italian American middle class, a new influx of Italian immigrants, as well as the growing role Italian Americans had as both producers and consumers. This development of Italian Americans’ firm association with whiteness was a dominant trend, albeit a much messier one than I suggest here.29 Meanwhile, as their connection to whiteness became unequivocal, Italian Americans retained their identity as ethnics, or as is more commonly stated today, as “white ethnics” or “European ethnics”: Italian Americans assimilated but “retain[ing] an ethnic connotation and developing a particular ‘culture’.”30
15Flaminio Di Biagi and other scholars illustrate what is in fact a contradiction in how Italian American identity and popularity changed over the twentieth century. Popular media and consumer culture at once represented Italian Americans as not completely or simply white while more and more frequently imparting on that ambiguous-white-experience a favored popular stance.31 The cinematic images of Italian immigrants in the first decades after World War II in films such as Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949) or George Cukor’s Wild is the Wind (1957) furthered the notion of a complex ethnic identity by offering narratives of hyper-sexualized and desperate recent Italian immigrant women who were at once unique and othered as they were also sought after and popularized.32
16Later still, in the post-civil rights decade of the 1970s and following, consumer-based media representations of Italian Americans became particularly mainstream. Both large block-buster films and popular television sitcoms and dramas in this era contained a number of high-visibility story-lines that centered on working class Italian American heroes (or anti-heroes) as well as struggling urban Italian American families – e.g., Rocky (1976) and Saturday Night Fever (1977), but also television characters such as Arthur Fonzarelli from Happy Days (ABC: 1974-1984) or Vinnie Barbarino from Welcome Back, Kotter (ABC: 1975-1979).33
17Organized crime, although not the focus of many such films and televisions shows, was certainly a central theme of the era as well. And while the Italian American-as-working-class-hero was celebrated at this time, the legend-making idea of the Italian American idolized gangster, the so-called “Godfather effect,” began in this period.34 Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part One (1972) and Part Two (1974), coming after the popular success of Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel of the same name, had a great deal to do not only with a renewed popularity of Italian American gangster characters across all media but with Italian American themes generally. Indeed, Fred Gardaphé notes that Don Corleone is “the first fictional gangster who is not presented as a psychopath” and thus he could reach an “iconic status.”35 The Puzo and Coppola texts created a rags-to-riches ethnic white American male, who, through a narrative that is difficult to describe without hackneyed references, is a hard-working, determined young man, overcoming various challenges and ultimately succeeds, raising not only his own self-worth but the everyday lives of his children, grandchildren, and extended family. Coppola’s films and other subsequent gangster films with prominent Italian American characters revitalized the gangster genre and helped reinforce the idea that being Italian American was cool. Moreover, this revitalization came at a time when diversity generally was exploited by popular mass-produced culture (e.g., Blaxploitation films) as a celebration of a multicultural America took hold of U.S. institutions even as racial harmony was far from a reality in U.S. society.
18In a sense, the perfect marriage of the working class and gangster themes of Italian American representation in this era is found in one of Martin Scorsese’s early forays into Italian ethnic cinematic life: his Mean Streets (1973) countered The Godfather’s mythologizing of Italian American gangster life by narrating the lives of working class low-level street thugs in New York City.36 In so doing, the film borrowed heavily from Italian films – Federico Fellini’s 1953 I Vitelloni as well as the gritty style of neorealist films.37 We might also consider Scorsese’s documentary Italianamerican (1974) and other early films as part of this 1970s-era favoring of an Italian American working class ethos.
19Along with a number of other factors – including an increased visibility of Italian consumer goods and popular entertainers imported from Italy as well as an increase in Italian migration in the post-World War II decades – such popular culture images of the 1970s helped reinforce the idea that being Italian American was cool, interesting, and hip.38 This appeal of all-things Italian had started earlier with the arrival of Italian divas such as Anna Magnani and Sofia Loren, who made films in Hollywood39 as well as the popularity of U.S. entertainers, such as Italian American crooners (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como). Even perhaps the somewhat obscure and short-lived but iconic Johnny Staccato television series (NBC: 1959-1960), starring John Cassavetes who played a night-club jazz pianist/private investigator in New York City, may have contributed to the increasingly hip associations of Italian Americans.40 In short, in the 1970s the Italian American association with popular coolness became codified and quite mainstream.41
20We could also trace, in the eras after this explosive working class/gangster era, other prominent kinds of representations of Italian Americans on screen. Spike Lee, for instance, has, over decades now, shaped aspects of his film career with insightful and polemical narratives where Italian and Italian American characters are interconnected with African-American ones. His take on Italian-inflected stories includes: the racialized violence in Do the Right Thing (1989), a film which continues to resonate for U.S. film viewers thirty years later, given the tragic numbers of hate crimes and police brutality against minorities; the inter-racial relationships in Jungle Fever (1991); the urban insularity and fear mongering of Summer of Sam (1999); and the political confusion in Miracle at Santa Anna (2008). In various ways Lee has repeatedly recounted the interwoven relationships between Italian Americans and African Americans.42
21Not, though, until the latter half of the last century and first decade of the new century do we see another watershed moment in how Italian Americans are represented on screen – both small and large. In this era, television rose as once again a key medium through which Italian American ethnicity was (re)defined and (re)popularized.43 Italian Americans have had a presence on television since commercial programming began – as early as 1948 Los Angeles-based KFI-TV premiered a show, later picked up by ABC, called Mama Rosa, about an Italian immigrant widow.44 Since then, a number of high profile characters and shows involving many genres – situation comedies, variety shows, detective shows – have featured Italian American themes and characters. However, a particularly complex legacy has been brought to the surface with show runner David Chases’ The Sopranos (HBO: 1999-2007). Chase created a community of Italian Americans from New Jersey who were heavily self-reflective and ironic. The show both fulfilled and furthered a number of pre-established characterizations about East Coast Italian Americans, while also establishing some unique, fully-realized characters. Each episode is embedded with inter-textual popular media references, especially those connected to an Italian East-coast ethnic identity. The show’s characters quote freely from Scorsese’s and Coppola’s Italian American oeuvres in a way that Gardaphé has discussed as a kind of constructive parody.45 It also tackles head-on claims of ethnic maligning by creating sharply thought-out narratives around contentious issues such as Italian Americans’ love of Columbus/Columbus Day or Italian Americans’ nostalgia for the motherland.46
22The development and airing of a handful of reality television shows (shows that purport to present non-actors in true-to-life scenarios but are not quite documentary-like) focusing on Italian American life, e.g., The Real Housewives of New Jersey (Bravo, 2009-2018), came within a few years of The Sopranos. Most famously, the show Jersey Shore (MTV, 2009-2012) presented the audience with a re-popularized youth culture – so-called “Guido culture” – exploiting and decontextualizing what Donald Tricarico has documented as an authentic urban and suburban youth identity and community with its own relationship to consumerism, popular culture, and race – and class-based struggles.47
23Reaching the years leading up to the writing of this chapter, an Italian American presence continues in all popular media. Big-budget cinematic productions such as John Crowley’s Brooklyn (2015) renders visible a conventional image of Italian Americans and their descendants within a romantic narrative of ethnic pride, nostalgia, and white ethnic companionship. Smaller, independent films use Italian American identities not so much as the guiding narrative force but rather as a way to shape a character’s personality and motivation: Matthew Bonifacio’s Amexicano (2007) juxtaposes Italian American identity with undocumented Latin-American immigrant identity in a quirky comedic drama and Maria Maggenti’s Puccini for Beginners (2007) sets up a conventional romantic love triangle with an urban lesbian twist to the narrative. Such renderings point to other possible ways of being and understanding Italian American millennial identities.
24Interestingly, beyond narrative (fictional) film the documentary genre is a noteworthy addition to the filmic representation of the Italian diaspora. On an upswing globally, the genre has become more broadly accepted as part of the entertainment industry, not just as a pedagogical tool. Scholars have noticed and have begun to engage critically with the countless documentaries now shaping stories about the cultural traditions, beliefs, values and both contemporary and historical experiences involving the Italian diaspora.48
25As for the future of Italian American mediated experiences, it will not be on traditional syndicated television or film but instead will be found online, in some sort of streaming digital media format. Already the Internet offers novel aspects of ethnic representation and is an ever-growing important medium through which to understand ethnicity across a widely transnational landscape. The Internet continues to create a global audience that is informed by earlier and on-going popular images but that are less likely to be locally bound in how they are received and understood by viewers. Online viewing has allowed for the global development of a virtual community of viewers who share certain deep cultural referents and knowledge. The example of the Italian-Canadian international phenomenon of Nonna Maria (2005 - ) wonderfully exemplifies this new Italian diasporic ethnic mediascape. Explaining the type of format or genre that Nonna Maria belongs to is challenging as standard media terminology simply does not capture its fluid approach to creativity: A vaudevillian-style puppet and live-action performance, streamable on YouTube (with companion Facebook and Twitter feeds) and relying on multilingual and multicultural audiences for its success barely suggests its perceptive approach to narrative. Nonna Maria, an Italian-Canadian immigrant living in Quebec, speaks a combination of English, French, Italian, and Calabrian dialect; she interacts in a comical way mainly with her twenty-something grandson, David, who tolerates his grandmother’s immigrant habits although he would rather be spending time on “facciabook.” As Giovanna Del Negro has described, Nonna Maria is the brainchild of Anthony Imperioli who came up with the main character as a teenager when he used to make “prank phone calls… to the Leonardo Da Vinci Italian Cultural Community Center in Montreal”49 and is made by a collaboration between Imperioli, David Iarusso, Eric Carpanzano and Erminio Iadeluca. Much of the show’s humor relies on an insider knowledge of Montreal’s Italian community experience – each episode is “replete with ethnic references specific to Montreal’s Italian community”,50 and at the same time, it engenders a greater Italian-Anglophone diaspora consciousness given that it is followed in Australia and the United States, for Italian ethnics who know English and who are familiar with migrant experiences, and are in on the jokes. As Del Negro suggests: “the Italian ethnic identity parodied in Imperioli’s YouTube episode valorizes and pays homage to immigrant creativity, resourcefulness, tenacity, and poetry epitomized in the speech, gestures, and arts of arrangiarsi (making due) that in many ways people like Nonna Maria display.”51
26Further, and quite importantly, Nonna Maria offers an unusual protagonist – an elderly immigrant woman. Such a character, especially in the hands of a young male media maker, proposes creative expressions of Italian diasporic identities that certainly can be understood as edges or alternatives. Again, I quote Del Negro:
In the midst of a patriarchal Italian culture that often relegates women to the margins of society, it is remarkable that a third-generation Italian ethnic man has created an older female character that not only occupies center stage but makes men the butt of her jokes. By inverting traditional gender relations and refusing to be quiet or obedient, Imperioli has found in Nonna Maria’s unique vernacular a wonderfully transgressive expression of feminist humor and female jouissance, Italian style.52
27With audiences who are constantly engaged in the creation, manipulation, and dissemination of such media through YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media, a program like Nonna Maria requires us to rethink the relationship between audience and text. These digital expressions remind us that the original popular images and “texts” are by no means stagnant. They have become richly hybrid, always reproduce-able and alterable, evoking the kind of power that John Fiske long-ago attributed to the simple living room television screen.53 Similarly, they suggest that in audiences’ recasting lies the possibility of new concepts and new directions for how Italian diasporic culture and identity is lived, experienced, and understood on a global scale.
28The Internet has also encouraged the creation and easy dissemination of countless (often ironic) mash-ups, memes, and other visual parodies (often difficult to attribute to any one person) of Italian Americans. For example, the use of footage from the venerable Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) children’s television program Sesame Street (PBS: 1969 - ) with audio lines from a number of Scorsese’s films creates Martin Scorsese’s Sesame Streets,54 which includes hilariously shocking and practically sacrilegious scenes of the innocent Grover, Bert, Ernie and the whole puppet crew cursing like only Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci can. The layering of meaning captured in such short pieces requires a well-attuned audience. A Raging Fred mash-up starts with vignettes from the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Flintstones (ABC: 1960-1966) and adds audio lines from Scorsese’s Raging Bull.55 Borrowing heavily from a half a dozen iconic film settings, characters, and genres and a beat that samples the Bee Gees, the mash up Hell’s Club also exploits a number of Italian-sAmerican actors and characters to create its seductive and playful narrative.
29Many such inter-textual constructions of popular media can be found online through the recasting of scenes from the television series The Simpsons (Fox: 1989 - ). Even without such online reformulations, this show can be defined by its always already overuse of clichés, a characteristic of the show that has made it useful for such postmodern sampling. For example, a montage of images using the iconic Nino Rota theme from The Godfather summarizes that same film in less than one minute and twenty seconds with an alarmingly poignant and detailed set of clips. This brief sampling only skims the surface of what is possible online and the direction such creative expressions will take in the future.
A privileged ethnicity
30In an overview essay such as this one, I would be remiss not to contend with the issue of stereotypes within cinematic representations of Italian Americans. Much scholarship around Italian Americans and media tends to focus on issues related to stereotyping in great part because of the extent of it in popular culture and the public outcry (historically and in more recent eras) by prominent Italian American organizations who oppose certain repeated imagery. Most controversies claim that popular culture denigrates all Italian Americans by incriminating them by association: e.g., anyone coming from an assumed Italian American family must also be a gangster and that being a gangster is a bad thing. Prominent Italian American organizations, such as the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF) or the Order Sons of Italy in America (OSIA), have at times led anti-defamation claims with the goal of boycotting or otherwise stirring up controversy meant to dismantle such images’ assumed consumer power.56 The examples of such public claims to defamation are many and connect to practically every era of mass media production. In earlier eras, when Italian Americans were ambiguously associated with whiteness, the effect of such stereotyping was certainly incriminating, but what effect does it have now? I propose that such prevalent images can be understood as a reflection of a favored, privileged ethnic identity in the United States. Let us consider one of the most ubiquitous of images: the Italian American-as-gangster.
31The mediated correlation between Italian Americans and gangsters is a privileged ethnic stereotype for a few reasons. First, as Gardaphé has clarified in his From Wise Guys to Wise Men, the gangster has from the get-go been an “attractive figure in popular culture”57 reaching an iconic status with The Godfather. Gangsters are glorified and celebrated popular culture images. In their association with working class values, their everyday lives are alternative to mainstream culture. Gangsters wear silk shirts, drive expensive cars, spend time with beautiful women and among the opulence of jewelry and abundant food and drink. They may be criminals – but they are criminals with style. Further, they are criminals who have fought against discrimination, bigotry, and various structural institutions that historically neither supported their moral system nor the greater non-criminal Italian immigrant community of which they were also a part. Indeed, journalist Bill Tonelli has provocatively suggested that those who feel most insulted by the images of gangsters are merely envious that they cannot live their lives like those characters.58
32Secondly, the conventional gangster image favors a certain kind of ethnic American masculinity (centered on heterosexuality, homophobia, racism, and misogyny). In so doing, it negates many other realities. Such films come up short when it comes to representations of women, precisely because of the way that they offer a hyper (or exaggerated) view of heterosexual male Italian ethnic identity. These films, and the gangster popular culture en masse, lessens the role, culture, history, and everyday lives of Italian American women.59 This gendered blindness creates an historical omission and inauthenticity with respect to gender and women’s histories, and therefore of Italian American life generally. In this sense, the gangster image is not a useful, productive, or progressive image but instead one that relies on the preferences received from conventional notions of heteronormative, masculine culture.
33Thirdly, and most polemically, is the premise that the Italian American gangster is a privileged ethnic stereotype because today there is no discrimination caused by these stereotypes. By privilege here I mean that no one is literally being hurt or physically violated by this stereotype – a drastic difference to the experience of many minority or marginalized communities. The stereotype does not lead to young Italian American men and women being brutalized by the police and Italian American youth are never physically threatened by non-Italian American youth. Even beyond such physical brutality Italian Americans en masse are not discriminated against in other ways, such as on university or job applications because of the popular association with criminality. Their identity is simply not damaged materially or economically, as is the case, instead, with African-Americans, Latinos, and other marginalized communities where stereotypes similarly coded through criminality have long reinforced social realities of discrimination, prejudice and racism.60
34This perspective on clichéd images – suggesting that some mediated images are more damaging than others – does not mean that such stereotypes are not problematic. For starters, as mentioned above, the Italian American-as-gangster image favors simplistic renderings of Italian American history by favoring certain kinds of heteronormative male stories. They create narratives of masculinity and domesticity that often seem lacking in complexity. Some scholars have teased out some of the multifaceted ways masculinity is captured at times in such cinematic stories.61 Sometimes, if we are lucky, they are funny (e.g., the character of Fat Tony in The Simpsons) but limiting nevertheless. On the other hand, individuals who are, even jokingly, associated with gangsters may be psychologically affected, emotionally annoyed, or upset by being stereotyped. As Shoat and Stam suggest: “That films are only representations does not prevent them from having real effects in the world”.62 But again, the community at large is not negatively affected by the stereotype.63 A simple glance at the number of United States Supreme Court judges, U.S. senators, members of presidential administrations, mayors, or other government leaders, as well as scholars, scientists, and various professionals who are Italian American should attest to that. Bill Tonelli puts it this way: “Now, when you read an Italian [American] name in the newspapers, it’s more likely the president of IBM or Microsoft, or the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, than it is some loan shark or corrupt union official”.64 As Shoat and Stam have described in their seminal essay on media and stereotypes:
The facile catch-all innovation of ‘stereotype’ elides a crucial distinction; stereotypes of some communities merely make the target group uncomfortable, but the community has the social power to combat and resist them; stereotypes of other communities participate in a continuum of prejudicial social policy and actual violence against disempowered people, placing the very body of the accused in jeopardy.65
To repeat, Italian Americans are not being denied jobs, nor housing, nor are they routinely victims of police brutality,66 unlike individuals who come from communities of color – a clarification which cannot be overstated.
35While this privileged stereotype does not deny Italian Americans access to dominant social, economic, and political structures, it is nevertheless limited and unimaginative. One unintended consequence of the anti-defamation position opposing the mediated ethnic stereotype of Italians as gangsters is, paradoxically, that it continues to uphold very singular images of Italian Americans, images which deny other alternative forms of Italian identity. In other words, the anti-defamation pleas tend to encourage imagery associated with an entirely different set of stereotypes, usually around family, faith, and traditional gender roles. So that any image which does not conform to the assimilationist, upper class, “clean” white ethnicity that many prominent Italian Americans would like to see in popular culture is likewise marginalized. The anti-defamation concerns around stereotypes sometimes leads to “an aversion to proletarian histories and vernacular” expressions.67 While Joseph Sciorra and others have applied this logic to their analysis of folk culture and the lived experience of Italian Americans,68 we can also see this reaction in thinking about how media and media producers are recognized as part of the larger narrative of media representation of Italian American life.
36Thus, countering privileged stereotypes means first finding and encouraging the making of alternative images, which are used against rather than with conventional notions about the intersections of gender, race, and class. Such countering can also occur by recognizing the existence of other kinds of Italian American images (those edges of ethnicity) that perhaps have been undervalued, minimized, or otherwise ignored.
Family life, Intimacy, and Love Along the Edges of Ethnicity
37In the third part of this essay I take a brief look at two less recent, under-studied films which offer complex renderings of the Italian American experience under a backdrop of what might first seem to be a stereotyped trope, the Italian American family. In a purposeful way, these examples play into those stereotypes even as they redirect them. Applying a Gramscian approach to cinema lends itself well to considering domestic space as a useful location for elaborating on the construction of ethnicity in the everyday lived experiences of individuals and to examine how such constructed ethnic experiences may function (in sometimes less visible ways), against the grain of larger institutional practices and values.
38The two films that I focus on here – Richard Quine’s Full of Life (1956) and Robert Mulligan’s Love with The Proper Stranger (1963) – are certainly not the only such films through which we could explore the nuances of Italian ethnic domesticity, family life, intimacy, and love. Other films also take on Italian American family life, love, and intimacy in ways that counter large and broad-scale stereotypes about Italian Americans, especially in relation to the home and domesticity.69 I am particularly interested in these two, though, in part precisely because they are not typically studied by Italian American studies scholars.70
[Pict. 1a et 1b. Intimacy in Full of Life (1956) and Love with The Proper Stranger (1963)]


39Richard Conte may be more famous for playing Don Barzini (from “After all, we are not Communists” fame in The Godfather), but it is as Nick Rocco, in Richard Quine’s Full of Life, that he most astutely captures some of the complexities of an Italian American identity and the film offers a unique image of Italian American family life, love, and intimacy. In this 1956 film, based on the novel (and screenplay) by John Fante, Conte plays a veiled Fante character: a young, married, Italian American struggling writer, living off an advance with his pregnant (non-Italian American) wife, Emily (played by Judy Holliday) in postwar suburban Glendale, California. The young couple have a playful companionship as they struggle to figure out exactly what it means to be adults, parents, and life partners in their modern Southern California suburb. The crisis of the film centers around Emily’s pregnancy, a termite infestation, and the couple’s grappling with religious beliefs.
40Fante’s presence in this film is concrete and real. Indeed, Stephen Cooper in in his biography of Fante, also entitled Full of Life, notes that Nick quotes a line from Fante’s Ask the Dust at one point even.71 And while my reading here is on the film, not the novel, the importance of Fante’s script and his other writing where Italian Americans figure prominently should not be undervalued. Fante’s writing certainly offers readers nuanced renderings of Italian American experiences – that they are recognized as part of an alternative within American letters only reinforces how Fante reworks potentially clichéd literary tropes.72
41The film was marketed as a light-hearted romantic comedy, but it is much more serious than that because of the way it concludes with a reaffirmation of certain traditional Italian American (and Catholic) values. Cooper remarks on how the film’s “shrewdly orchestrated publicity campaign prepared the nation for Full of Life” and in some of these campaigns we can understand better the film’s emphasis on a particular kind of narrative around family.73 For instance, Macy’s Department Store created a series of tie-ins connected to Judy Holliday’s character, an expectant first-time mother; the store’s advertising campaign included a line that rings out-of-place, in the sterile, anti-breastfeeding, 1950s America: Full of Life “rates an extra round of cheers for treating pregnancy as naturally as… a walk in the country.”74
42The film’s wholesomeness is also vividly apparent in the broad slapstick comedy it favors. The classic scene of the eight-months pregnant, independent-thinking, Emily falling through her kitchen floor was certainly meant to have audiences in stitches. It reinforces the film’s overall traditional message and joyful approach by shaping characters with light-hearted middle-class problems and experiences. But beyond such whimsical, mainstream references are moments which are plausibly ethnic precisely given their comedic exaggerations. In such moments, the film overall offers a reimagined image of the Italian American family, one working against a stereotype that associates Italian Americans with an over-abundant family life or with an excess of violence.
43In some of the film’s ethnic comedic sketches we witness the creation of a non-typecast, Italian American identity, placing it squarely in a California setting. Fante and Quine (although based on Fante’s novel, the two worked closely on the script) complicate Italian American filmic representation by capturing – in a touching and real-to-life way – images of West Coast Italians. In fact, the California Italian American experience is a particular combination of identity and location that Hollywood, still today, has yet to mine for clichés. The film uses jokes framed as ethnic-generational-clashes to move beyond stock Hollywood gags because they are placed far outside of the standard locations where those clichés are usually found. Consider the character of Nick’s father, Papa Vittorio Rocco, played by operatic bass, Salvatore Baccaloni. His actions, look, and language (not to mention his wife, played by Esther Miniciotti) characterizes him in certain ways as a stereotyped Italian immigrant, and yet he is likewise shaped by the unusualness of his persona. We meet Papa Rocco on his Sacramento Valley land. Pre-dating Don Corleone’s more famous moment with a feline, Papa Rocco sits with a kitten on his lap, talking of lemon trees, grape vines, and the magical qualities of garlic. Later, Papa Rocco brings a suitcase full of wine and food on the train from Sacramento to Los Angeles, embarrassing his grown son, but also calling attention to an Italian (immigrant) propensity toward homemade food and thriftiness. In a number of ways Quine and Fante work hard to call attention to the Rocco family’s Italianness, because without it the slapstick humor could not carry the film’s weighty conclusion.
44The film’s most embellished ethnic joke comes when Papa Rocco purposely destroys the young couple’s fireplace and builds an immense stone one in its place. He rips out an entire stucco wall – the standard material for California’s ranch houses – and replaces it with an intricate stone one. He constructs an absurdly beautiful and inspired structure, expressing an Italian American sense of place, one that leads the Dianetics-reading (and non-Italian American) Emily to a kind of cultural appropriation of Italian Americanness. That Papa Rocco’s construction is tied to California mid-century architecture (stucco and ranch houses) and to his immigrant working-class identity (a stone mason who never stops working), suggests a slew of possibilities about the ways Italian American identity has been shaped with and against other identities and experiences. This alignment reads obvious to a culturally informed audience (perhaps not surprising given the story’s origins with Fante). Italian Americans’ relationship to – and pride in – the hand-built environment is well documented by folklorists and other cultural scholars. From Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles to the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto in Staten Island we can articulate an Italian American aesthetic, one connected to a work ethos that involves skilled artisan labor and that favors creating something out of discarded or otherwise used materials, ultimately producing what Sciorra in relation to Rodia has remarked as “un lavoro ben fatto,” a “job well done”.75 With respect to the stonemason, we might even go so far as to see the stonemason as a cultural trope within Italian American literary and filmic expressions, although they would be ethnic insider references, not ones historically popularized by mainstream consumer audiences.
45The conclusion topples all of the comical conflicts, ending with a tidy, conventional resolution whereby the couple has a renewed relationship with the older generation, with Italian American culture, and with Catholicism itself. Thus, Full of Life can be understood as part of other Hollywood films from the post-World War II decades (from the 1947 Gentleman’s Agreement to the 1961 Flower Drum Song) whereby ethnicity gets cleaned up and made accessible to a non-ethnic audience.76
46Much the same can be said of Robert Mulligan’s Love with the Proper Stranger, although the stakes the film is dealing with are much higher. The narrative takes on the limited choices faced by an Italian American woman a decade before abortion was legalized in the United States (1973). The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Natalie Wood’s portrayal of Angie Rossini, the young Italian American woman who finds herself pregnant after a one-night encounter with Rocky Papasano (played by Steve McQueen).
47The film’s exposition quickly gets to the drama at hand: Angie, a sales clerk at Macy’s Department Store, goes looking for Rocky on her lunch break at a New York City musicians’ hiring hall, and tells him frankly: “I’m gonna have a baby… Don’t worry, I’m not gonna cause you any trouble, all I want from you is a doctor, an address, you know.” The narrative sensitively handles the challenging decision faced by Angie as she courageously considers: a risky illegal abortion, leaving her overbearing family and wrestling with the possibility of single motherhood, marrying a man she barely knows or another one she does not love. It also comes shockingly close to showing an abortion on screen.
48That director Robert Mulligan and writer Arnold Schulman place Italian American characters at the center of this narrative, a story with a very controversial topic, not to mention a ghastly visual image of the set up for a back-alley abortion, is surprising. Why highlight the character’s ethnicity for such a sensitive narrative? And why make the characters Italian American specifically? The film makes use of Italian American characters to give shape to a narrative that in great part is simply about generational rifts within immigrant families – marked most prominently by a bohemian tendency in a young man who does not want to settle down and a young woman’s growing sense of independence. Although some of the supporting characters are drawn in stereotypical fashion (e.g., nagging mothers, protective brothers), the two protagonists – Rocky and Angie – come across as complex, layered characters. They pre-date the 1970s working-class ethos while offering viewers a couple who develop a healthy romantic love based on shared values and balanced exchange.
49Further, in no way does Love with the Proper Stranger shy away from marking the protagonists and their immediate families as Italian American – from the game of bocce and wine to vegetable peddlers and exchanges in Italian. As Marina de Bellagente La Palma puts it, the protagonists “are meticulously authenticized as Italian American through names, accents, neighborhoods, mannerisms…77 La Palma offers an astute reading of the film, calling it an “inverted Romeo and Juliet story,” where the families would love for them to get together. For La Palma, the characters’ “italianicity” is a great illustration of ethnic stereotyping for the sake of easy story-telling. In other words: “in the strict economy of commercial cinema, it has served as a kind of compression: to quickly make a working-class character recognizable to large urban audiences.”78 Moreover, the film, for La Palma, is emblematic of the larger generational “gulf between immigrants and their Americanized children” by making the characters Italian American the film addresses “quintessentially American themes of upward mobility and the importance of individuation, the Italian family provides an apt and ready-made foil.” Theresa Carilli, however, in her “Still Crazy After All These Years,” suggests a reading that counters La Palma’s and argues that the film “failed to present… multidimensionality of character” and goes on to say that “some of the family interaction, which had a seemingly comic intention, was overplayed and made the characters appear like unsympathetic whiners.”79 This overplaying is certainly part of the broad strokes with which some of the characters are drawn, especially, I argue, Angie’s brothers (wonderfully played by Herschel Bernardi and Harvey Lembeck). However, they fail to win our sympathies not so much because they are caricatures – which they are – but because they refuse to accept Angie as a fully-individualized woman.
50My reading of Love with the Proper Stranger favors La Palma’s take. Angie and Rocky are thoughtful and sensible even at their most ambivalent; further, Wood’s and McQueen’s performances are human and real. The film ends predictably, with the two opting for marriage. Angie rejects her other options – a dangerous abortion, single motherhood, or a loveless marriage (her well-intentioned suitor, played by Tom Bosley, would have never been able to fulfill her full desires). This ending could fairly easily be read as reactionary and, at the least, like any standard Hollywood light romantic drama; however, given the era of its production one can imagine certain social constraints which would have limited the plot’s resolution.
51The film does not have the artistic flare nor the neorealist intent of, for instance, a film like Morris Engel’s 1958 Weddings and Babies – another film that situates Italian American assimilation in the hands of the smart, young, and bohemian.80 But Love with the Proper Stranger gives us a glimpse into some of the conflicts between traditional values and more modern possibilities – conflicts that suggest the likelihood that tomorrow some lovers might find a hybrid, or just plain kooky, way of making it all work out.
Revealing the Edges of Ethnicity
52In 1999 I taught an Italian American film course at the University of California Davis, where one of my students put together a short video as part of a final project. He went around campus asking students and faculty alike if they recognized photos of famous “real” Italian Americans and famous “media” Italian Americans in order to make a point about how popular culture images of Italian Americans were more widely known than historical figures. It was a straightforward piece, but smartly conceived and executed – Mario Cuomo vs. Super Mario; Al Capone vs. Al Pacino as the Godfather; Rocky Balboa vs. Rocky Marciano, etc. Again and again, those he interviewed successfully identified the popular fictional image rather than the real individual. In the popular instances he chose, ethnicity was writ large. I suspect no one would be surprised if a similar exercise today, some twenty years later and with an expanded mediascape, would result in similar conclusions.
53And yet I end with this brief anecdote in order to return to the notion of the importance in reading popular media not only for those moments where Italian ethnicity is cast in bright neon lights but also where it is subtle or barely apparent. Such alternative images, such edges of ethnicity, require us to see those aspects of Italian American culture and history that are themselves sometimes marginal, understated, or simply not given much attention. So doing, then, helps render visible Italian American mediated experiences with complexity and brilliance.
Author’s Note:
54I dedicate this essay to JoAnne Ruvoli (1968-2018), in memory of her intellectual brilliance and generous soul. I thank Marina de Bellagente La Palma and Giovanna Del Negro for sharing their unpublished conference papers with me. I am grateful to Joseph Sciorra for his invaluable comments on an earlier version of this essay. My thinking on Italian American popular images has benefitted greatly from presenting my media work at numerous conference panels and public programming events alongside of colleagues over the course of the last dozen years: Teri Ann Bengiveno, Jonathan Cavallero, Clarissa Clò, Evelyn Ferraro, John Gennari, Samuele Pardini, JoAnne Ruvoli, and Pasquale Verdicchio.
Portions of this essay first appeared in my blog, Raccogli e passa: “Italian American Romance in the Era Before Roe v. Wade” (http://bloggers.iitaly.org/node/8418), “Hollywood, Italian Americans, and the Golden Coast” (http://bloggers.iitaly.org/node/15192), and “The Other Rocky” (http://bloggers.iitaly.org/node/5328).
Notes de bas de page
1 Guido Tintori and Michele Colucci, “From Manpower to Brain Drain? Emigration and the Italian State between Past and Present,” in The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Italy: History, Politics, Society, eds. Andrea Mammone, Ercole Giap Parini, and Giuseppe A. Veltri (New York: Routledge, 2015), 37.
2 Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).
3 Laura E Ruberto. and Joseph Sciorra, eds., New Italian Migrations to the United States: Art and Culture since 1945 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
4 See Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound By Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson Press, 1997); Graziella Parati. Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005); Laura E. Ruberto. Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women’s Work in Italy and the U.S. (Lanham, MA: Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007); Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, eds., Post-Colonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (New York: Palgrave, 2012); Teresa Fiore, Pre-Occupied Spaces: Re-Mapping Italy’s Emigration, Immigration, and (Post-)Colonialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).
5 See Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, eds., Post-Colonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity; Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Stephanie Malia Hom, eds., Italian Mobilities (New York: Routledge, 2015); Fiore, Pre-Occupied Spaces: Re-Mapping Italy’s Emigration, Immigration, and (Post-)Colonialism.
6 Ella Shoat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 2014).
7 Ruberto. Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women’s Work in Italy and the U.S.
8 Ruberto, Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women’s Work in Italy and the U.S., 15.
9 On my use of “edges of ethnicity” see my “Cultural Studies and the Intermittence of Ethnicity in Italian Diaspora Studies,” RSA Journal (Rivista di Studi Americani), Vol. 30, 2019, 116-20.
10 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. by Richard Miller. (New York: MacMillan, 1975), 10.
11 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 7.
12 Ruberto, Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women’s Work in Italy and the U.S., 86.
13 Anthony Julian Tamburri, “A Contested Place: Italian Americans in Cinema and Television,” in Cinema and Television: Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, eds. Edvige Giunta and Kathleen Zamboni McCormick (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2010), 209.
14 See Giuliana Muscio, Napoli, New York, Hollywood: Italian Performers in the United States (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).
15 Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 33.
16 Pasquale Verdicchio, Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2011), 115-30; Joseph Cosco, Imagining Italians: The Clash of Romance and Race in American Perceptions (New York: SUNY Press, 2012), 21-60.
17 Giorgio Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010).
18 Giorgio Bertellini, “The Atlantic Valentino: The ‘Inimitable Lover’ as Racialized and Gendered Italian,” in Intimacy and Italian Migration: Gender and Domestic Lives in a Mobile World, eds. Loretta Baldassar and Donna Gabaccia (Fordham University Press, 2011), 37-48; Muscio, Napoli, New York, Hollywood: Italian Performers in the United States.
19 Muscio, Napoli, New York, Hollywood: Italian Performers in the United States, 54. Modotti’s cinematic work requires much more analysis, as Muscio explains, p. 56: “Together with singer Lina Cavalieri, Tina Modotti was the only Italian actress to star in an American silent film: a record to be considered when dismissing her Hollywood film career as a secondary sphere in her biography.”
20 William J. Connell, “Darker Aspects of the Italian American Prehistory,” in Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice, eds. William J. Connell and Fred Gardaphé (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 11-22; Fred Gardaphé, “Invisible People: Shadows and Light in Italian American Writing,” in Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice, eds. Connell and Gardaphé, 1-10.
21 Within months of the December 1941 Japanese bombing on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order #9066 which led to the relocation and internment of over 115,000 Japanese-Americans, approximately two-thirds of which were native-born United States citizens. German-Americans and Italian Americans were also affected by this order although to a much smaller degree in great part due to the already-rampant anti-Asian racism in the United States and the fact that German-Americans and Italian Americans more easily passed as members of the white European majority. See Daniels, 2004 and DiStasi, 2001.
22 Thomas A. Gugliemo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
23 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights American (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2006), 95.
24 Jennifer Gugliemo and Salvatore Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? : How Race is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003); Stefano Luconi,“Anti-Italian Prejudice in the United States: Between Ethnic Identity and the Racial Question,” in Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian American Cinema, eds. Giuliana Muscio et al. (New York: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 2010), 33-44.
25 Fred Gardaphé, From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities (New York: Routledge Press, 2006).
26 Verdicchio, Bound By Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora, 97-115.
27 Stefano Luconi, “Anti-Italian Prejudice in the United States: Between Ethnic Identity and the Racial Question,” in Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian American Cinema, eds Giuliana Muscio et al., 34.
28 Gugliemo and Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America, 34.
29 Some of this messiness can be seen by studying Italian Americans relationship to television especially with respect to gangster images in the 1950s and following. See especially Laura Cook Kenna’s work (2009 and 2016) on The Untouchables and Michael Frontani’s work (2016) on the nationally televised Kefauver hearings.
30 Flaminio Di Biagi, Italoamericani: tra Hollywood e Cinecittà (Milano: Le Mani Editore, 2010), 34, my translation.
31 Jonathan Cavallero, Hollywood's Italian American Filmmakers Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino (Champaign: Illinois University Press, 2011), 151-63.
32 See Ruberto, Laura E, “‘Hot-blooded Eye-talian’ Women: The Lascivious and Desperate Italian Postwar Immigrant in Cinema,” in New Italian Migrations to the United States: Volumes II, Art and Culture Since 1945, eds. Ruberto and Sciorra, 65-92.
33 Courtney Judith Ruffner, “Cultural Stereotyping in Happy Days and The Sopranos,” in Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, eds. Giunta and Zamboni McCormick, 231-38; Tamburri, “A Contested Place: Italian Americans in Cinema and Television”; Jonathan Cavallero, and Laura E. Ruberto, eds. “Introduction: Italian Americans and Television,” Italian American Review. Vol. 6. no. 2 (Summer 2016), 160-72.
34 Tom Santopietro, The Godfather Effect: Changing Hollywood, America, and Me (New York: Macmillan Press, 2012).
35 Gardaphé, From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities, 21.
36 Robert Casillo, The Gangster Priest: The Italian American Cinema of Martin Scorsese (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Aaron Baker, ed., A Companion to Martin Scorsese, (New York: Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2015).
37 Laura E. Ruberto, “Italian Films, New York City Television, and Martin Scorsese’s Neorealism,” in A Companion to Martin Scorsese, ed. Aaron Baker, 53-70.
38 Donald Tricarico, “In a New Light: Italian American Ethnicity in the Mainstream,” in The Ethnic Enigma: The Salience of Ethnicity for European-Origin Groups, ed. Peter Kivisto (Philadelphia: The Balch Institute Press, 1989), 24-46; Simone Cinotto, ed., Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Ruberto and Sciorra, eds., New Italian Migrations to the United States: Art and Culture since 1945.
39 Ruberto and Sciorra, eds., New Italian Migrations to the United States: Art and Culture since 1945.
40 Laura E. Ruberto, “Make that Riff Staccato: Johnny Staccato and the Making of an Italian-American Ethnicity” (unpublished paper, Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Boston, March 2012).
41 Simone Cinotto, “Introduction. All Things Italian: Italian American Consumers, the Transnational Formation of Taste, and the Commodification of Difference,” in Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities, ed. Cinotto, 1-31.
42 Pasquale Verdicchio, Devils in Paradise (Toronto: Guernica, 1997); John Gennari, “Giancarlo Giuseppe Alessandro Esposito: Life in the Borderlands,” in Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America, eds. Guglielmo and Salerno, 234-249; John Gennari, Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
43 Cavallero and Ruberto, “Introduction: Italian Americans and Television,” 160-172.
44 Cavallero and Ruberto, “Introduction: Italian Americans and Television,” 160.
45 Gardaphé, From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities, 150-64.
46 David Lavery, Douglas Howard, Paul Levinson, eds., The Essential Sopranos Reader (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011).
47 Donald Tricarico, “Guidos on MTV, Tangled up in the Feedback Loop,” in Guido: Italian/American Youth and Identity Politics, eds. Letizia Airos and Ottorino Cappelli (New York: Bordighera Press, 2011), 106-14; Donald Tricarico, “New Second-Generation Youth Culture in the Twilight of Italian American Ethnicity,” in New Italian Migrations to the United States: Politics and History since 1945, eds. Ruberto and Sciorra, 132-45.
48 See Serra 2008 and Muscio 2011 for analyses of some documentaries on Italian Americans. Since 2011 the bi-yearly published Italian American Review regularly runs reviews of documentary films and other documentary digital media about the Italian diaspora, further suggesting the breadth and depth of contemporary productions.
49 Giovanna DelNegro, “‘Nonna Maria’s Cantina Canadese’: Language, Ambivalence and Ethnic Nostalgia,” Italian American Studies Association, Annual Conference (Tampa, Florida, October 2011).
50 DelNegro, “‘Nonna Maria’s Cantina Canadese’: Language, Ambivalence and Ethnic Nostalgia”.
51 DelNegro, “‘Nonna Maria’s Cantina Canadese’: Language, Ambivalence and Ethnic Nostalgia”.
52 DelNegro, “‘Nonna Maria’s Cantina Canadese’: Language, Ambivalence and Ethnic Nostalgia”.
53 John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989).
54 http://youtube.com/watch?v=SlssPfeuk6M, accessed December 2, 2015.
55 http://youtube.com/watch?v=xXjGPTqh_Xw&feature=related, accessed December 2, 2015.
56 See, in particular, Gardaphé, From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities and Tamburri, “A Contested Place: Italian Americans in Cinema and Television”.
57 Gardaphé, From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities, 21.
58 Bill Tonelli, “A Sopranos Secret: Given the Choice, We’d All Be Mobsters,” The New York Times, March 4, 2001. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/arts/television-radio-a-sopranos-secret-given-the-choice-we-d-all-be-mobsters.html?pagewanted=2, accessed December 10, 2015.
59 Ruberto, Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women’s Work in Italy and the U.S., 81-108.
60 Shoat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.
61 Gardaphé, From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities; George De Stefano, An Offer We Can't Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America (New York: Faber & Faber, 2007); George De Stefano “A ‘Finook’ in the Crew: Vito Spatafore, The Sopranos, and the Queering of the Mafia Genre,” in The Essential Sopranos Reader, eds. Lavery and Howard, 114-23.
62 Shoat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, 802.
63 Cavallero, Hollywood's Italian American Filmmakers Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino.
64 Tonelli, “A Sopranos Secret: Given the Choice, We’d All Be Mobsters,”.
65 Shoat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, 183.
66 Joseph Sciorra, “Fear and (Self)Loathing in Italian America,” (2010), accessed November 20, 2018
http://bloggers.iitaly.org/node/13046.
67 Sciorra, “Fear and (Self)Loathing in Italian America,” (2010).
68 Joseph Sciorra, Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City (Nashville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015); Tricarico, “In a New Light: Italian American Ethnicity in the Mainstream,” 24-46.
69 See, for example, films by Nancy Savoca, such as True Love (1989) and Household Saints (1993) or Penny Marshall’s Riding in Cars with Boys (2001).
70 I suspect that given the auteur basis of much film scholarship, the fact that these two films are not directed by Italian American filmmakers has lessened their interest among scholars in the field.
71 Stephen Cooper, Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante (New York: North Point Press, 2000), 254.
72 See Cooper, Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante; Teresa Fiore, ed., The Road to Italy and the United States: La creazione e diffusione delle opere di John Fante (Quaderni del ‘900 – Vol. 6, 2006).
73 Cooper, Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante, 255.
74 Cooper, Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante, 255.
75 Joseph Sciorra in Sabato Rodia and the Watts Towers in Los Angeles: Art, Migrations, Development, ed. Luisa Del Giudice (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Sciorra, Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City.
76 Lester D. Friedman, Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema (Champaign: Illinois University Press, 1991).
77 Marina De Bellagente La Palma, “With the Proper Fever,” American Italian Historical Association, Annual Conference, November 1999, San Francisco, n.p.
78 Marina De Bellagente La Palma, “With the Proper Fever,” n.p.
79 Theresa Carilli, “Still Crazy After All These Years,” in Cultural Diversity and the U.S. Media, eds. Yahya R. Kamalipour and Theresa Carilli (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 119.
80 Antonio Napolitano, “Neorealism in Anglo-Saxon Cinema,” in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, eds. Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 126.
Auteur
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Poison et antidote dans l’Europe des XVIe et XVIIe siècles
Sarah Voinier et Guillaume Winter (dir.)
2011
Les Protestants et la création artistique et littéraire
(Des Réformateurs aux Romantiques)
Alain Joblin et Jacques Sys (dir.)
2008
Écritures franco-allemandes de la Grande Guerre
Jean-Jacques Pollet et Anne-Marie Saint-Gille (dir.)
1996
Rémy Colombat. Les Avatars d’Orphée
Poésie allemande de la modernité
Jean-Marie Valentin et Frédérique Colombat
2017
