Critical Studies in Italian America

"A rich array of perspectives on the creative work of the eccentric immigrant laborer who created one of the most mysterious landmarks of Los Angeles." -Donna Gabaccia, Professor of History, University of Minnesota The Watts Towers, wondrous objects of art and architecture, were created over the course of three decades by a determined, single-minded artist, Sabato Rodia, an Italian immigrant laborer who wanted to do "something big." Now a National Historic Landmark and internationally renowned destination, the Watts Towers in Los Angeles are both a personal artistic expression and a collective symbol of Nuestro Pueblo-Our Town/Our People. Featuring fresh and innovative examinations, Sabato Rodia's Towers in Watts revisits the man and his towers. In 1919, Rodia purchased a triangular plot of land in a multiethnic, working-class, semi-rural district. He set to work on an unusual building project in his own yard. By night, Rodia dreamed and excogitated, and by day he built. He experimented with form, color, texture, cement mixtures, and construction techniques. He built, tore down, and rebuilt. As an artist completely possessed by his work, he was often derided as an incomprehensible crazy man. Providing a multifaceted, holistic understanding of Rodia, the towers, and the cultural/social/physical environment within which the towers and their maker can be understood, this book compiles essays from twenty authors, offering perspectives from the arts, the communities involved in the preservation and interpretation of the towers, and the academy. Most of the contributions originated at two interdisciplinary conferences held in Los Angeles and in Italy, and the collection as a whole is a well-rounded tribute to one man's tenacious labor of love. A portion of royalties will go to support the work of the Watts Towers Arts Center.

A history of the Italians who came to the United States after World War II, and how American immigration policy was transformed. Whom We Shall Welcome examines post-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. Battisti's work is an important contribution toward understanding the construction of Italian American racial/ethnic identity in this period, the role of ethnic groups in US foreign policy in the Cold War era, and the history of the liberal immigration reform movement that led to the 1965 Immigration Act. Whom We Shall Welcome makes significant contributions to histories of migration and ethnicity, post-World War II liberalism, and immigration policy.

This cinema history illuminates the role of southern Italian performance traditions on American movies from the silent era to contemporary film. In Napoli/New York/Hollywood, Italian cinema historian Giuliana Muscio investigates the significant influence of Italian immigrant actors, musicians, and directors on Hollywood cinema. Using a provocative interdisciplinary approach, Muscio demonstrates how these artists and workers preserved their cultural and performance traditions, which led to innovations in the mode of production and in the use of media technologies. In doing so, she sheds light on the work of generations of artists, as well as the cultural evolution of "Italian-ness" in America over the past century. Muscio examines the careers of Italian performers steeped in an Italian theatrical culture that embraced high and low, tragedy and comedy, music, dance, acrobatics, naturalism, and improvisation. Their previously unexplored story-that of the Italian diaspora's influence on American cinema-is here meticulously reconstructed through rich primary sources, deep archival research, extensive film analysis, and an enlightening series of interviews with heirs to these traditions, including Francis Coppola and his sister Talia Shire, John Turturro, Nancy Savoca, James Gandolfini, David Chase, Joe Dante, and Annabella Sciorra.

Celebrating one of the most important Italian American female authors of our time, Personal Effects offers a lucid view of Louise DeSalvo as a writer who has produced a vast and provocative body of memoir writing, a scholar who has enriched our understanding of Virginia Woolf, and a teacher who has transformed countless lives. More than an anthology, Personal Effects represents an author case study and an example for modern Italian American interdisciplinary scholarship. Personal Effects examines DeSalvo's memoirs as works that push the boundaries of the most controversial genre of the past few decades. In these works, the author fearlessly explores issues such as immigration, domesticity, war, adultery, illness, mental health, sexuality, the environment, and trauma through the lens of gender, ethnic, and working-class identity. Alongside her groundbreaking scholarship, DeSalvo's memoirs attest to the power and influence of this feminist Italian American writer.

Winner: Vasiliki Karagiannaki Prize for the Best Edited Volume in Modern Greek Studies Promotes the understanding of Italian Americans and Greek Americans through the study of their interactions and juxtapositions. Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation contributes to U.S. ethnic and immigration studies by bringing into conversation scholars working in the fields of Italian American and Greek American studies in the United States, Europe, and Australia. The work moves beyond the "single group" approach-an approach that privileges the study of ethnic singularity——to explore instead two ethnic groups in relation to each other in the broader context of the United States. The chapters bring into focus transcultural interfaces and inquire comparatively about similarities and differences in cultural representations associated with these two groups. This co-edited volume contributes to the fields of transcultural and comparative studies. The book is multi-disciplinary. It features scholarship from the perspectives of architecture, ethnomusicology, education, history, cultural and literary studies, and film studies, as well as whiteness studies. It examines the production of ethnicity in the context of American political culture as well as that of popular culture, including visual representations (documentary, film, TV series) and "low brow" crime fiction. It includes analysis of literature. It involves comparative work on religious architecture, transoceanic circulation of racialized categories, translocal interconnections in the formation of pan-Mediterranean identities, and the making of the immigrant past in documentaries from Italian and Greek filmmakers. This volume is the first of its kind in initiating a multidisciplinary transcultural and comparative study across European Americans.

Fourteen cultural history essays exploring the relationship between Italian Americans, consumer culture, and the American identity. 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 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 US 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. "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

By linking Italy's long history of emigration to all continents in the world, contemporary transnational migrations directed toward it, as well as the country's colonial legacies, Fiore's book poses Italy as a unique laboratory to rethink national belonging at large in our era of massive demographic mobility. Through an interdisciplinary cultural approach, the book finds traces of globalization in a past that may hold interesting lessons about inclusiveness for the present. Fiore rethinks Italy's formation and development on a transnational map through cultural analysis of travel, living, and workspaces as depicted in literary, filmic, and musical texts. By demonstrating how immigration in Italy today is preoccupied by its past emigration and colonialism, the book stresses commonalities and dispels preoccupations.

This volume assembles for the first time a staggering multiplicity of reflections and readings of John Fante's 1939 classic, Ask the Dust, a true testament to the work's present and future impact. The contributors to this work-writers, critics, fans, scholars, screenwriters, directors, and others-analyze the provocative set of diaspora tensions informing Fante's masterpiece that distinguish it from those accounts of earlier East Coast migrations and minglings. A must-read for aficionados of L.A. fiction and new migration literature, John Fante's "Ask the Dust": A Joining of Voices and Views is destined for landmark status as the first volume of Fante studies to reveal the novel's evolving intertextualities and intersectionalities. Contributors: Miriam Amico, Charles Bukowski, Stephen Cooper, Giovanna DiLello, John Fante, Valerio Ferme, Teresa Fiore, Daniel Gardner, Philippe Garnier, Robert Guffey, Ryan Holiday, Jan Louter, Chiara Mazzucchelli, Meagan Meylor, J'aime Morrison, Nathan Rabin, Alan Rifkin, Suzanne Manizza Roszak, Danny Shain, Robert Towne, Joel Williams