Making Italian America
Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities
Will be published approx. on 1. April 2014
Book
Hardback
352 pages
978-0-8232-5623-5 (ISBN)
Description
How do immigrants and their children forge their identities in a new land-and how does the ethnic culture they create thrive in the larger society? Making Italian America brings together new scholarship on the cultural history of consumption, immigration, and ethnic marketing to explore these questions by focusing on the case of an ethnic group whose material culture and lifestyles have been central to American life: Italian Americans.
As embodied in fashion, film, food, popular music, sports, and many other representations and commodities, Italian American identities have profoundly fascinated, disturbed, and influenced American and global culture. Discussing in fresh ways topics as diverse as immigrant women's fashion, critiques of consumerism in Italian immigrant radicalism, the Italian American influence in early rock 'n' roll, ethnic tourism in Little Italy, and Guido subculture, Making Italian America recasts Italian immigrants and their children as active consumers who, since the turn of the twentieth century, have creatively managed to articulate relations of race, gender, and class and create distinctive lifestyles out of materials the marketplace offered to them. The success of these mostly working-class people in making their everyday culture meaningful to them as well as in shaping an ethnic identity that appealed to a wider public of shoppers and spectators looms large in the political history of consumption. Making Italian America appraises how immigrants and their children redesigned the market to suit their tastes and in the process made Italian American identities a lure for millions of consumers.
Fourteen essays explore Italian American history in the light of consumer culture, across more than a century-long intense movement of people, goods, money, ideas, and images between Italy and the United States-a diasporic exchange that has transformed both nations. Simone Cinotto builds an imaginative analytical framework for understanding the ways in which ethnic and racial groups have shaped their collective identities and negotiated their place in the consumers' emporium and marketplace.
Grounded in the new scholarship in transnational U.S. history and the transfer of cultural patterns, Making Italian America illuminates the crucial role that consumption has had in shaping the ethnic culture and diasporic identities of Italians in America. It also illustrates vividly why and how those same identities-incorporated in commodities, commercial leisure, and popular representations-have become the object of desire for millions of American and global consumers.
As embodied in fashion, film, food, popular music, sports, and many other representations and commodities, Italian American identities have profoundly fascinated, disturbed, and influenced American and global culture. Discussing in fresh ways topics as diverse as immigrant women's fashion, critiques of consumerism in Italian immigrant radicalism, the Italian American influence in early rock 'n' roll, ethnic tourism in Little Italy, and Guido subculture, Making Italian America recasts Italian immigrants and their children as active consumers who, since the turn of the twentieth century, have creatively managed to articulate relations of race, gender, and class and create distinctive lifestyles out of materials the marketplace offered to them. The success of these mostly working-class people in making their everyday culture meaningful to them as well as in shaping an ethnic identity that appealed to a wider public of shoppers and spectators looms large in the political history of consumption. Making Italian America appraises how immigrants and their children redesigned the market to suit their tastes and in the process made Italian American identities a lure for millions of consumers.
Fourteen essays explore Italian American history in the light of consumer culture, across more than a century-long intense movement of people, goods, money, ideas, and images between Italy and the United States-a diasporic exchange that has transformed both nations. Simone Cinotto builds an imaginative analytical framework for understanding the ways in which ethnic and racial groups have shaped their collective identities and negotiated their place in the consumers' emporium and marketplace.
Grounded in the new scholarship in transnational U.S. history and the transfer of cultural patterns, Making Italian America illuminates the crucial role that consumption has had in shaping the ethnic culture and diasporic identities of Italians in America. It also illustrates vividly why and how those same identities-incorporated in commodities, commercial leisure, and popular representations-have become the object of desire for millions of American and global consumers.
Reviews / Votes
"Making Italian America is not the first study of racial or ethnic consumption practices, but it stands out as an ambitious endeavour that extends the framework across four generations, multiple American cities and locales, transnational networks, and a variety of consumer goods, behaviours, and styles...Making Italian America is a ground-breaking contribution to the fields of ethnic and cultural studies and a handbook for anyone seeking to understand both the Italian American experience and America's history as consumed by one of its largest minorities." -- Stephen Fielding -Altreitalie: International Journal of Studies on Italian Migrations in the World "Making Italian America is an innovative and entertaining addition to the body of Italian-American literature." -Voce Italiana "Through its attentiveness to Italian-American consumers and the U.S. consumption of Italianness, this collection of essays makes a compelling case for taste as a leading determinant of ethnic identity. Ranging from nineteenth-century immigration to twenty-first century popular culture, from fashion to Italian-themed restaurants, from one side of the Atlantic to the other and back across again, this volume casts ethnicity as more a matter of style than of tradition, due to its ever-changing nature. Like the very best lasagnes - layered, multi-textured, the whole a transcendent blending of the constituent parts - Making Italian America reveals how we have all come to be at least partly Italian and what this Italianness means." -- -Kristin Hoganson author of Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 "This is an important volume contributing to the diachronic study of Italian American culture and identity and their intersections with symbolic and material consumption in a transnational framework. The sociological analysis advances an understanding of ethnicity beyond the ideology of easily disposable symbolic identities, opening new venues for thinking about European Americans." -- -Yiorgos Anagnostou The Ohio State University "This compelling and innovative volume captures the complexities of the pivotal role of consumption in the historical formation of transnational Italian American taste, positing a distinctive diasporic consumer culture that continues its importance today. Richly interdisciplinary, the collection represents an exciting new resource for scholars and students alike." -- -Marilyn Halter Boston University "Wherever you turn in Simone Cinotto's chock-full volume of essays, Italian-American identity is revealed as Consumer-Made, Consumer-Making, Commodity-Using, Commodity-Abusing: from fashion consciousness upon arrival to late-generation Armani mafiosi, from Valentino and Caruso to Guido-and-Guidette, and from Charles Atlas' dynamic tension to the Calipari-Izzo split in sideline schtick. The resultant history is as rigorous as it is capacious, the sociology diversely insightful and at times inspired, and the critical intelligence almost always that of hardball dagotude--that form of intellectual witness, swapped and reswapped across the Mediterranean Atlantic, at once fiercely loving and deeply suspicious. Wednesday is once again Prince Spaghetti Day, L'America!" -- -Thomas J. Ferraro Duke University "Each of the essays is theoretically well informed, and they cohere remarkably well. Moreover, the emergent themes and the chronological structure give a sense of historical changes and emerging trends." -- -James Pasto Ethnic and Racial StudiesMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-8232-5623-5 (9780823256235)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
04/2014
1st Edition
Fordham University Press
€31.99
Available for download
E-Book
04/2014
1st Edition
Fordham University Press
€31.99
Available for download
Person
Simone Cinotto teaches history at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo, Italy. He is the author of The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City and Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California.
Content
Introduction. All Things Italian: Italian American Consumers, the Transnational Formation of Taste, and the Commodification of Difference Simone Cinotto Part I. Immigrants Encounter and Remake U.S. Consumer Society: The Formation of Italian American Identity Through Commodities and Commercial Leisure, 1900-30 1. Visibly Fashionable: The Changing Role of Clothes in the Everyday Life of Italian American Immigrant Women Vittoria Caterina Caratozzolo 2. Making Space for Domesticity: Housing, Furnishings, Kitchenware, and Bedding in Working-Class Italian American Homes, 1900-40 Maddalena Tirabassi 3. "In Italy Everyone Enjoys It-Why not in America?": Italian Americans and Consumption in Transnational Perspective during the Early Twentieth Century Elizabeth Zanoni 4. Sovereign Consumption: Italian Americans' Transnational Film Culture in 1920s New York City Giorgio Bertellini 5. Consuming "La Bella Figura": Charles Atlas and American Masculinity, 1910-1940 Dominique Padurano 6. Radical Visions and Consumption: Culture and Leisure in the Early-Twentieth-century Italian American Left Marcella Bencivenni Part II. The Politics and Style of Italian American Consumerism, 1930-80 7. Italian Americans, the New Deal State, and the Making of Citizen Consumers Stefano Luconi 8. Italian Americans, Consumerism, and the Cold War in Transnational Perspective Danielle Battisti 9. Italian Doo-Wop: Sense of Place, Politics of Style, and Racial Crossovers in Postwar New York City Simone Cinotto 10. Consuming Italian Americans: Invoking Ethnicity in the Buying and Selling Guido Donald Tricarico Part III. Consuming Italian American Identities in the Multicultural Age, 1980 to the Present 11. The Double Life of the Italian Suit: Italian Americans and the "Made in Italy" Label Courtney Ritter 12. Sideline Shtick: The Italian American Basketball Coach and Consumable Images of Racial and Ethnic Masculinity John Gennari 13. The Immigrant Enclave as Theme Park: Culture, Capital, and Urban Change in New York's Little Italies Ervin Kosta 14. We Are Family: Ethnic Food Marketing and the Consumption of Authenticity in Italian-Themed Chain Restaurants Fabio Parasecoli List of Contributors Index