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Sunday dinners, basement kitchens, and backyard gardens are
everyday cultural entities long associated with Italian Americans,
yet the general perception of them remains superficial and
stereotypical at best. For many people, these scenarios trigger
ingrained assumptions about individuals' beliefs, politics,
aesthetics, values, and behaviors that leave little room for nuance
and elaboration. This collection of essays explores local knowledge
and aesthetic practices, often marked as "folklore," as sources for
creativity and meaning in Italian-American lives. As the
contributors demonstrate, folklore provides contemporary scholars
with occasions for observing and interpreting behaviors and objects
as part of lived experiences. Its study provides new ways of
understanding how individuals and groups reproduce and contest
identities and ideologies through expressive means. Italian Folk
offers an opportunity to reexamine and rethink what we know about
Italian Americans. The contributors to this unique book discuss
historic and contemporary cultural expressions and religious
practices from various parts of the United States and Canada to
examine how they operate at local, national, and transnational
levels. The essays attest to people's ability and willingness to
create and reproduce certain cultural modes that connect them to
social entities such as the family, the neighborhood, and the
amorphous and fleeting communities that emerge in large-scale
festivals and now on the Internet. Italian Americans abandon,
reproduce, and/or revive various cultural elements in relationship
to ever-shifting political, economic, and social conditions. The
results are dynamic, hybrid cultural forms such as valtaro
accordion music, Sicilian oral poetry, a Columbus Day parade, and
witchcraft (stregheria). By taking a closer look and an
ethnographic approach to expressive behavior, we see that
Italian-American identity is far from being a linear path of
assimilation from Italian immigrant to American of Italian descent
but is instead fraught with conflict, negotiation, and creative
solutions. Together, these essays illustrate how folklore is evoked
in the continual process of identity revaluation and reformation.
This collection offers a fresh re-reading and re-imagining of
Italian Americans in film, from actors to directors, from subject
to agency. The trans-Atlantic discourse that emerges from these
keenly insightful essays offers a guidepost for future analyses. As
we come to understand the evolving paradigm of Italian Americans,
whose cinematic representation has long been object of discussion
and debate, Mediated Ethnicity constitutes a prismatic lens through
which the contemporary viewer/reader may re-discover the cultural
positioning of Italians in America. - John Tintori Associate Arts
Professor and Chair, Graduate Film Program New York University
Tisch School of the Arts
Once, the spraycan "kings" of New York's subways astounded the
world with their exuberant graffiti images. Now a new generation of
artists has hit the streets and is decorating neighbourhood walls
with memorials to the tragic and untimely deaths of friends and
loved ones. "R.I.P." - assembling the very best of a vibrant street
art wave - contains colour photographs of memorials from Harlem and
the Lower East Side, the South Bronx and Brooklyn, as well as the
moving stories behind them. The victims of shootings, accidents,
arguments, police killings and drug-related turf wars may be gone,
but thanks to these paintings they are not forgotten: for a violent
and indifferent city has also spawned a rich urban art form. Martha
Cooper's first book of photographs was "Subway Art" (with Henry
Chalfant, Thames and Hudson, 1984).
This second volume of New Italian Migrations to the United States
explores the evolution of art and cultural expressions created by
and about Italian immigrants and their descendants since 1945. The
essays range from an Italian-language radio program that broadcast
intimate messages from family members in Italy to the role of
immigrant cookbook writers in crafting a fashionable Italian food
culture. Other works look at how exoticized actresses like Sophia
Loren and Pier Angeli helped shape a glamorous Italian style out of
images of desperate postwar poverty; overlooked forms of brain
drain; the connections between countries old and new in the works
of Michigan self-taught artist Silvio Barile; and folk revival
performer Alessandra Belloni's reinterpretation of tarantella dance
and music for Italian American women. In the afterword, Anthony
Julian Tamburri discusses the nomenclature ascribed to Italian
American creative writers living in Italy and the United States.
Contributors: John Allan Cicala, Simone Cinotto, Teresa Fiore,
Incoronata (Nadia) Inserra, Laura E. Ruberto, Joseph Sciorra, and
Anthony Julian Tamburri.
For Italian immigrants and their descendants, needlework represents
a marker of identity, a cultural touchstone as powerful as pasta
and Neapolitan music. Out of the artifacts of their memory and
imagination, Italian immigrants and their descendants used
embroidering, sewing, knitting, and crocheting to help define who
they were and who they have become. This book is an
interdisciplinary collection of creative work by authors of Italian
origin and academic essays. The creative works from thirty-seven
contributors include memoir, poetry, and visual arts while the
collection as a whole explores a multitude of experiences about and
approaches to needlework and immigration from a transnational
perspective, spanning the late nineteenth century to the late
twentieth century. At the center of the book, over thirty
illustrations represent Italian immigrant women's needlework. The
text reveals the many processes by which a simple object, or even
the memory of that object, becomes something else through literary,
visual, performance, ethnographic, or critical reimagining. While
primarily concerned with interpretations of needlework rather than
the needlework itself, the editors and contributors to Embroidered
Stories remain mindful of its history and its associated cultural
values, which Italian immigrants brought with them to the United
States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina and passed on to their
descendants.
For Italian immigrants and their descendants, needlework
represents a marker of identity, a cultural touchstone as powerful
as pasta and Neapolitan music. Out of the artifacts of their memory
and imagination, Italian immigrants and their descendants used
embroidering, sewing, knitting, and crocheting to help define who
they were and who they have become. This book is an
interdisciplinary collection of creative work by authors of Italian
origin and academic essays. The creative works from thirty-seven
contributors include memoir, poetry, and visual arts while the
collection as a whole explores a multitude of experiences about and
approaches to needlework and immigration from a transnational
perspective, spanning the late nineteenth century to the late
twentieth century.
At the center of the book, over thirty illustrations represent
Italian immigrant women's needlework. The text reveals the many
processes by which a simple object, or even the memory of that
object, becomes something else through literary, visual,
performance, ethnographic, or critical reimagining. While primarily
concerned with interpretations of needlework rather than the
needlework itself, the editors and contributors to "Embroidered
Stories" remain mindful of its history and its associated cultural
values, which Italian immigrants brought with them to the United
States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina and passed on to their
descendants.
This second volume of New Italian Migrations to the United States
explores the evolution of art and cultural expressions created by
and about Italian immigrants and their descendants since 1945. The
essays range from an Italian-language radio program that broadcast
intimate messages from family members in Italy to the role of
immigrant cookbook writers in crafting a fashionable Italian food
culture. Other works look at how exoticized actresses like Sophia
Loren and Pier Angeli helped shape a glamorous Italian style out of
images of desperate postwar poverty; overlooked forms of brain
drain; the connections between countries old and new in the works
of Michigan self-taught artist Silvio Barile; and folk revival
performer Alessandra Belloni's reinterpretation of tarantella dance
and music for Italian American women. In the afterword, Anthony
Julian Tamburri discusses the nomenclature ascribed to Italian
American creative writers living in Italy and the United States.
Contributors: John Allan Cicala, Simone Cinotto, Teresa Fiore,
Incoronata (Nadia) Inserra, Laura E. Ruberto, Joseph Sciorra, and
Anthony Julian Tamburri.
Over the course of 130 years, Italian American Catholics in New
York City have developed a varied repertoire of devotional art and
architecture to create community-based sacred spaces in their homes
and neighborhoods. These spaces exist outside of but in
relationship to the consecrated halls of local parishes and are
sites of worship in conventionally secular locations. Such ethnic
building traditions and urban ethnic landscapes have long been
neglected by all but a few scholars. Joseph Sciorra's Built with
Faith offers a place-centric, ethnographic study of the religious
material culture of New York City's Italian American Catholics.
Sciorra spent thirty-five years researching these community art
forms and interviewing Italian immigrant and U.S.-born Catholics.
By documenting the folklife of this group, Sciorra reveals how
Italian Americans in the city use expressive culture and religious
practices to transform everyday urban space into unique, communal
sites of ethnically infused religiosity. The folk aesthetics
practiced by individuals within their communities are integral to
understanding how art is conceptualized, implemented, and esteemed
outside of museum and gallery walls. Yard shrines, sidewalk altars,
Nativity presepi, Christmas house displays, a stone-studded grotto,
and neighborhood processions-often dismissed as kitsch or prized as
folk art-all provide examples of the vibrant and varied ways
contemporary Italian Americans use material culture, architecture,
and public ceremonial display to shape the city's religious and
cultural landscapes. Written in an accessible style that will
appeal to general readers and scholars alike, Sciorra's unique
study contributes to our understanding of how value and meaning are
reproduced at the confluences of everyday life.
Italian immigration from 1945 to the present is an American
phenomenon too little explored in our historical studies. Until
now. In this new collection, Laura E. Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra
edit essays by an elite roster of scholars in Italian American
studies. These interdisciplinary works focus on leading edge topics
that range from politics of the McCarren-Walter Act and its effects
on women to the ways Italian Americans mobilized against
immigration restrictions. Other essays unwrap the inner workings of
multi-ethnic power brokers in a Queens community, portray the
complex transformation of identity in Boston's North End, and trace
the development of Italian American youth culture and how new
arrivals fit into it. Finally, Donna Gabaccia pens an afterword on
the importance of this seventy-year period in U.S. migration
history. Contributors: Ottorino Cappelli, Donna Gabaccia, Stefano
Luconi, Maddalena Marinari, James S. Pasto, Rodrigo Praino, Laura
E. Ruberto, Joseph Sciorra, Donald Tricarico, and Elizabeth Zanoni.
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