Making Italian America
Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Fordham University Press
Published:1st Apr '14
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£83.00(9780823256235)
A fascinating exploration of consumer culture in Italian American history and life, the role of consumption in the production of ethnic identities, and the commodification of cultural difference.
Addressing topics in the history and sociology of fashion, film, food, popular music, sports, masculinity, youth subcultures, and the politics of consumption, Making Italian America explores consumer culture in Italian American history and life, the role of consumption in the production of ethnic identities, and the commodification of cultural difference.
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...
"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 Studies
- Winner of John G. Cawelti Award for Best Textbook/Primer in Popular and American Culture 2015
ISBN: 9780823256242
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
352 pages