Italian American culture Research Papers (original) (raw)

This is the brochure for the April 2018 conference “Corporeal Restrictions, Embodied Freedoms: Italian Interventions on the Body” organized by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, City University of New York.... more

- by
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- Gender Studies, Art History, Italian Studies, Diasporas

CALL FOR PAPERS: "Italian Sonorities and Acoustic Communities: Listening to the Soundscapes of Italianità" conference, April 27-29, 2017 at Queens College's John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 25 West 43rd Street, Manhattan.... more

- by Joseph Sciorra
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- Radio And Sound Studies, Oral history, Soundscape Studies, Sound studies

In memory of a doyen in Italian-American studies, Gabriele Scardellato (York University).

ASpecial Issue on Organized Crime

This well written essay’s basic premise is that all Italian and Italian American foods and traditions are not the same. When it comes to food and foodways Italians and Italian Americans are governed more by regionalism (both in Italy and in the US) and Catholicism than they are by a single tradition. Using the Christmas Eve (and Day in Part II) feast of antipasti, primi, secondi, and dessert foods of Italian Americans from various parts of Italy and the United States as examples, the author illustrates that Italian American foods and traditions do not stem from a single foodway (Not all Italians or Italian Americans eat seven dishes on Christmas Eve). Rather, each dish offers clues to the family’s distinct heritage. That heritage is governed more by who conquered them, where they lived, and what the area grew than it does by the tradition itself which was often established by the Catholic Church. The tradition is the unifier. The regionalism is the divider and identifier. The essay also makes a strong distinction between Italians and Italian Americans. The desire of Italian Americans to keep their traditions intact froze traditions in America. Italy marched in one direction, unifying the country. Italian Americans marched in the opposite direction, maintaining the regionalism that made them unique. If a person does not understand these basic concepts about Italian Americans he or she will never understand what constitutes Italian American foods and traditions in the United States. It is not pasta. It is not pizza. It can never be that simple.
A version of this article and some of the recipes appeared in Western Pennsylvania History, the official magazine of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania in December 1999. Part II: Christmas Day was in the December 2000 edition.

Program for the conference "Bambini, Ragazzi, Giovani: Children and Youth in Italy and the Italian Diaspora" held April 24-25, 2015 at the midtown Manhattan offices of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute (Queens, City... more

T his chapter is a preliminary exploration of the links between three layers of vernacular religion and the experiences underlying them: Italian vernacular religion and healing, Italian American versions of these customs, and Stregheria, or Italian American revival Witchcraft, 1 a Neo-Pagan religion practiced by second-, third-and fourth-generation Italian Americans seeking new ways to connect with spirituality and construct ethnic identity. I argue that Italian vernacular religion was linked to a number of geographic, economic, religious, and social factors that were particular to the regions and towns in which it developed, but also partook of a broader cosmology that I am calling "the enchanted worldview." In this chapter, I will outline some of the parameters of this worldview and sketch its particulars, especially in the areas of vernacular healing, magic, and witchcraft. I also propose that American scholars reconsider historical approaches to the study of tradition, especially when these can shed light on how traditions change over time to incorporate elements from elite and ecclesiastical cultures.

- by Sabina Magliocco
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- Folklore, Magic, Witchcraft, Religion and Magic, Neopaganism
- by Joseph Sciorra and +2
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- Music, Soundscape Studies, Sound studies, Italian American Studies

The construction and development of cultural identities is a complex process and many factors determine failure or success in the preservation of the system of values of the culture of origin in a different context1. An imaginative re-creation of a new set of values that cease to be carriers of the original environment steadily show signs of a new culture, modified by the effects of connection with the new contact culture. This paper examines the effects of such modifications in the Italian/American context from a socio-linguistic perspective. A sample of Italian-American informants have been selected using a popular social network, Facebook, involving ethnically conscious young volunteers (i.e. subscribers of Italian/American groups in the network) whose first language is American English. Informants were asked questions with regard to their use of language, their self-perceptions of their linguistic identities and non-Italian assessment of Italian-American culture. As far as the latter issue is concerned, popular culture has also been taken into account, considering linguistic representations of Italian-American people in the media (i.e. TV shows, movies, advertisement) and their response to it. The method of selection of informants, their attitude and self-perceived language use will be discussed.

- by Maria Grazia Sindoni
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- Media Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Italian Studies, Sociolinguistics

Following World War I, as the 19th amendment helped redefine the role of American women in the public arena, a new model of womanhood, inspired by the "flappers", challenged the traditional approach to femininity. This article aims at analyzing how Il Progresso Italo- Americano and other Italian-American newspapers reacted to such changes in American society. Defending the old patriarchal values, which still prevailed among Southern European immigrants, most Italian-American journalists expressed their disapproval of the suffrage movement, attacked the "flappers", and ridiculed the feminists. In the name of their cultural heritage, they fiercely opposed the American model, and presented the Italian woman as an exemplary alternative. Even when Mussolini introduced in Italy an electoral reform which allowed a certain category of women to vote at the local level, the Italian-American press supported the project on the very ground that the Italian woman was above all a mother and a wife who was not given to erroneous idea of her place in society and who would therefore be reliable as a voter. By omitting to mention the struggle led by the existing feminist organizations in Italy, the Italian-American press thus purposely associated emancipation with Americanism, and transformed the debate over feminism into an ethnic debate.

- by Bénédicte Deschamps
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- Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Women's History, Fascism
- by Vittoria Repetto
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- Poetry, Modern Poetry, Contemporary Poetry, Italian-American Literature

Published on Aug 24, 2016
Interview with Joan L. Saverino - San Giovanni in Fiore (CS), July 2016.
Music: tarantella, pastorale, sonata.
Images: West Virginia State Archives, Charleston WV and Joan Saverino
Editing by Alessandro Tarsia.
«New Nostoi Series» by Alessandro Tarsia, non-profit video.
Special Thanks: Antonia Prosperati, Comune di San Giovanni in Fiore, Museo Demologico dell'Economia del Lavoro e della Storia Sociale Silana, Abbazia Florense.

- by Joan L Saverino
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- Folklore, Italian Studies, Textiles, Material Culture Studies

Voices in Italian Americana 13.1 (2002), 16-22.

Pittsburgh is a city of wonderful ethnic neighborhoods (88 in all) isolated by hills that in other locations would be called mountains. You glide up Liberty Avenue from Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle, make your way along the fringe of the wholesale region called the Strip District, fall under the shadow of Polish Hill, and crest Liberty three miles later in turn-of-the-century Bloomfield, where a field of wildflowers once dominated the landscape. Although there are some Calabrese and Sicilian families, most of Bloomfield's 10,000 inhabitants are descendants of former citizens of a number of small villages in Abruzzi: Castel di Sangro, Roccacinquemiglia,* Ateleta, Roccarazza, and Pesco Costanza: one enormous extended family. In fact, there are more descendants of these villages in Pittsburgh than in Italy. Tradition is thriving in Bloomfield. In the kitchens of restaurants and homes, the women keep alive the foods and customs of the Province of Aquila in Abruzzi.

- by Michael Carosone
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- American Literature, History, American History, Cultural History

This article builds on the growing scholarship on material culture studies concerning the experiences of Italian immigrants and their descendants in the United States. We examine what happens when objects are removed from their previous sites of use and re-contextualized in the setting of eight Italian American museums, a process that involves privileging certain lived experiences and constructing authorial narratives of identity. We are particularly interested in critically highlighting the discrepancies between amateur and professional practices. Behind each object displayed are individuals whose lives intertwine with those same objects in meaningful ways; as Italian American culture continues to develop and shift, markers of its changes, noted in spaces such as museums, become all the more significant. These close associations between object, people, and greater meanings are brought to the surface in particularly striking ways within ethnic museum spaces, given that how material culture captures and recounts history underscores ideological motives.

- by Joseph Sciorra and +1
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- Museum Studies, Material Culture Studies, Museum, History of Museums

Music is mobile. It can be played and repeated several times in several places, it can be recorded in the personal memory, in music books and mobile mp3 players, thus people may take it along wherever they want. In comparison to other
cultural goods which establish group and personal identities, in migration processes, music is an outstandingly suitable item to be transferred as a marker of identity itself. Thus, the quality of musical identity construction is, as Simon Frith pointed out, mobile, dynamic, processual, performative, and not correlated with predefined borders. It is object to continuous renegotiation, in which music performative
supply is of importance. Certainly, the interrelationship between music and migration is anything but arbitrary.
In the case of professional music migration, people follow the demand for music; in mass migration, groups of people carry along repertoires they know as parts both of their personal memory and identity concept; in forced exile situations,
musicians and other people who are professionally involved with music may unfold their concept of musical activity in completely different environments. In this perspective written by the co-editor of the book Nils Grosch this paper analyzes some methodological approaches regarding the Italian diaspora in North America

- by simona frasca
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- Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, Popular Music, Ethnomusicology

In The Routledge History of Italian Americans (Routledge, 2018), pp. 91-104.

- by Michael Carosone
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- Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Sex and Gender

Si pone in rilievo il ruolo di una rivista di disegno industriale, oggi design, nella storia dell'italiano contemporaneo. Fondata dall'architetto Alberto Rosselli nel 1954, la pubblicazione trimestrale e poi bimestrale, «Stile industria», accompagnerà per nove anni la crescita della società italiana del "boom" economico, dando una forma testuale e linguistica al dibattito intorno all’estetica della produzione in serie, e toccando nel contempo un insieme di fenomeni e processi riguardanti diversi strati della popolazione coinvolti nella produzione e nel consumo dei beni. La nuova realtà produttiva, che ha profondamente modificato la vita della società italiana condizionando a partire dagli anni Cinquanta gli usi e i costumi della quotidianità, ha trovato nella disciplina del design una delle manifestazioni più evidenti. Alla sua fisionomia di materia e tecnica e artistica corrispondeva appieno l’impostazione del periodico guidato da Rosselli. E così, nella scrittura "del" e "sul" design, le parole antiche, "forma" e "formale", "funzione", acquistano una nuova accezione circoscritta al lavoro del designer. All’epoca poco frequenti nella lingua d’uso, i termini che le affiancano, "funzionale" e "funzionalità", dal linguaggio tecnologico passeranno rapidamente in quello del commercio e della pubblicità, per fissarsi stabilmente nel lessico di settori diversi. A questi si aggiungono "efficienza" ed "estetica", l’antico "creativo" con il valore del tutto nuovo di ‘dotato di fantasia e inventiva’ e la neoformazione "creatività".

- by Anna Siekiera
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- Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Design
- by Michael Carosone
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- American Literature, Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, Self and Identity

Open the link bit.ly/Pietro-DiDonato to join the event before the start.

- by Simone Brioni and +1
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- American Literature, Working-Class Literature, Modernism, Italian American culture

I approach this cultural apprehension through a three-pronged
reading of Pierre Bourdieu’s examination of taste regimes, Erving
Goffman’s understanding of stigma, and Robert Viscusi’s discussion of the internalized colonialism afflicting self-esteem. I begin
by tracing the sociolinguistic formulations of the term cafone in
Italy, in particular Southern Italy, and then among Italian immigrants in the United States. My cultural history continues with a
look at the emergence of the Italian American word gavone in
popular discourse, literature, and consumer culture, with a focus
on an episode of the TV show The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007). Finally, I examine contemporary ethnic spokespeople’s public critiques of media images concerning perceived breaches in behavior
through the lens of the 2017 Anthony Scaramucci scandal. My intention is to shed light on the supremacy of the endemic concept
of gavone for Italian Americans so as to illuminate the ways by which group identity is shaped, managed, and policed in the public sphere.

- by Joseph Sciorra
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- Media Studies, Sociolinguistics, Stigmatization, Italian American Studies

The aim of this study is to demonstrate the importance of ‘transferring’ expressions to target culture and its changeability according to both sociocultural perspectives and purposes of different translators of the same text by analysing the first and last Turkish translations of The Godfather. In order to analyse and compare translations, it is important to take into consideration that the nature of the target text is primarily determined by its skopos or commission (Vermeer, 1989/2000). Thus, same text or phrase can be translated in different ways and analysing this as an exact true or false could be misleading. In this study, translations are analysed according to equivalent effects and domestication or foreignisation methods. In order to reflect Italian-American culture to the target reader, the relationship between them should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message (Nida, 1964a). The main focus of the analysis is whether words or cultural expressions derive from Italian American and Sicilian culture are equivalently transferred, or even if not, examine the translator’s method and try to understand purposes or reasons that the translator chooses. In order to analyse cultural expressions of the source text, a comprehensive research of American-Italian culture is conducted and it is demonstrated in the analyse column of the chart. Apart from cultural expressions; omissions, additions or conscious alterations, self-censorships, ambiguities and numeric expressions are analysed as well.

Il 29 gennaio 1912, durante lo ‘sciopero del pane e delle rose’ proclamato dai tessili del Massachusetts, moriva un’immigrata italiana, uccisa dalla polizia locale. Ne furono però incriminati tre italo-americani, tra cui il sindacalista e letterato Arturo Giovannitti (1884- 1959). Per affermare l’innocenza degli accusati e salvarli dalla sedia elettrica, sorsero movimenti e associazioni in tutto il mondo. Proprio durante i dieci mesi di detenzione, Giovannitti compose il suo capolavoro, The Walker, una prosa lirica che riproduciamo nelle pagine seguenti, accompagnata da un’inedita versione in italiano di Francesco Medici (1974), apprezzato traduttore e critico, autore anche di questo profilo introduttivo.

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.

- by Joseph Sciorra
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- Folklore, Material Culture Studies, Vernacular Architecture, Urban Studies

Everyone must agree that the family sauce is a well guarded secret and family after family honors it. In 1999 I took my mother home to Tuscany and we watched our cousin make our family sauce. It was a revelation. Article incorporated... more

- by cassandra vivian
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- Italian Studies, Italian American Studies, Italian American culture

In this paper I explore the links between the figure of Satan and that of the familial patriarch in texts by John Fante, principally the short story 'The Orgy'. I suggest that, in Fante's visions of early-twentieth century Italian-American families, fears of material privation and fears of eternal damnation meet in the image of the dissolute, wayward father.

Il dialetto pugliese è la quarta lingua in cui scrive Tusiani, dopo l'italiano, l'inglese e il latino

- by Luigi Bonaffini
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- Italian Studies, Italian-American Literature, Italian American Studies, Puglia

In this interview release by stylist Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana we try to collect the most important topic in there narration in order to identify some cultural dimension located in their way of working and living their profession. The concept of cultural dimension originated from theorist Geert Hofstede ( 2011) will be used into a qualitative approach with the goal of offering a new methodology for looking to new topic present inside the interview corpus.

- by Edoardo Natale
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- Italian Cultural Studies, Italian American culture

Sculptor, critic, editor, author, poet, illustrator, cartoonist, teacher, Onorio Ruotolo was known as the “Rodin of Little Italy.” His sculpture was a model of realist academic art, grounded in the classics yet with a prevailing concern... more

- by Joseph Sciorra
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- Art History, New York history, Sculpture, Italian American Studies

This interdisciplinary conference focuses on material culture in the contexts of Italy, its colonies, and its diasporic communities. We are particularly interested in new approaches to the analysis of material culture that draw from the social sciences and the humanities, discovering hitherto unexplored perspectives and expressions. DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: SEPTEMBER 18, 2015. See attached PDF for more information.

- by Edvige Giunta
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- Film Studies, Film Analysis, Feminism, Film