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.