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By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America
In By the Breath of Their Mouths, Mary Jo Bona examines the oral uses of language and the liberating power of speech in Italian American writing, as well as its influences on generations of assimilated Italian American writers. Probing and wide-ranging, Bona’s analysis reveals the lasting importance of storytelling and folk narrative, their impact on ethnic, working-class, and women’s literatures, and their importance in shaping multiethnic literature.
Studies In Italian American Folklore
The first published collection of essays on the folk culture of Italian Americans and Canadians, this book attains a depth of analysis rarely attained in Italian American folklore scholarship. Italian American folklife is not evolving in a vacuum, it draws from dynamic, local and specific, as well as regional and national Italian cultural expressions.
Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative
In the first major critical reading of Italian American narrative literature in two decades, Fred L. Gardaphé presents an interpretive overview of Italian American literary history. Examining works from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, he develops a new perspective—variously historical, philosophical, and cultural—by which American writers of Italian descent can be read, increasing the discursive power of an ethnic literature that has received too little serious critical attention.
Were You Always an Italian?: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America
With a sympathetic but clear eye, she writes about guidos, bimbettes, and mammoni (mama's boys in Italy). She examines the clashing aesthetics of Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace, and unravels the etymology of southern Italian dialect words like gavone or bubidabetz.
Religious Festive Practices in Boston's North End - Ephemeral Identities in an Italian American Community
In this lively and accessible book, Augusto Ferraiuolo examines the many religious festivals in the Italian American community of Boston's North End. Using interviews, participant observation, and visual data, Ferraiuolo creates a vivid picture of how, over the course of a summer season, a number of religious festive practices are organized by multiple, overlapping, and, to some extent, competing voluntary organizations.
Sport and the Shaping of Italian-American Identity
An interdisciplinary analysis of the role of sport in the formation of an ethnic identity and the transition in that identity across four generations.
The Art of Reading Italian Americana: Italian American Culture in Review
THE ART OF READING ITALIAN AMERICANA is a celebration of the "Art of Reading," in which the reader and writer engage in dialogue. This book covers the ten-year period since Fred Gardaphé's DAGOES READ, from 1995-2005, and includes most of the reviews he published in Fra Noi during that period, along with a few longer reviews and review essays published elsewhere, to provide an in-depth view of the production of Italian American writers.
Whom We Shall Welcome: Italian Americans and Immigration Reform, 1945-1965
Whom We Shall Welcome examines World War II immigration of Italians to the United States, an under-studied period in Italian immigration history. Danielle Battisti looks at efforts by Italian American organizations to foster Italian immigration along with the lobbying efforts of Italian Americans to change the quota laws. While Italian Americans (and other white ethnics) had attained virtual political and social equality with many other groups of older-stock Americans by the end of the war, Italians continued to be classified as undesirable immigrants.
A New Guide to Italian Cinema (Italian and Italian American Studies)
This book is a complete reworking and update of Marga Cottino-Jones' popular A Student's Guide to Italian Film (1983, 1993) . This guide retains earlier editions' interest in renowned films and directors but is also attentive to the popular films which achieved box office success among the public.
Italian Birds of Passage: The Diaspora of Neapolitan Musicians in New York
This book, through the perspective of Italian American Immigrants, reviews the period from the unification of Italy to the fascist era through significant Neapolitan performers such as Gilda Mignonette and Enrico Caruso. It traces the transformation of a popular tradition written in dialect into a popular tradition, written in Italian, that contributed to the production of "American" identity.
Hollywood Italians: Dagos, palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos
From the silent era and The Black Hand (1906) to HBO's hit series The Sopranos, Hollywood has had a love-hate affair with Italian Americans. Hollywood Italians covers the careers of dozens of stars among them Rudolph Valentino, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone, Marisa Tomei, and James Galdolfini. In addition, the book reviews the work of such Italian American directors as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese in a fresh light.
When I am Italian
"My American ancestral Italian village was in Waterbury, Connecticut." In this sentence, Joanna Clapps Herman raises the central question of this book: To what extent can a person born outside of Italy be considered Italian? The granddaughter of Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States in the early 1900s, Herman takes a complicated and nuanced look at the question of to whom and to which culture she ultimately belongs.
The Italian American Table
Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, Simone Cinotto recreates the bustling world of Italian life in New York City and demonstrates how food was at the center of the lives of immigrants and their children. From generational conflicts resolved around the family table to a vibrant food-based economy of ethnic producers, importers, and restaurateurs, food was essential to the creation of an Italian American identity.
