You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This dazzling collection of original essays from some of the country's leading thinkers asks the rather intriguing question - Are Italians White? Each piece carefully explores how, when and why whiteness became important to Italian Americans, and the significance of gender, class and nation to racial identity.
A celebration of images of Italians in American motion pictures and their often under-appreciated, underpraised, and truly remarkable contribution to popular culture. This book covers the careers of dozens of stars like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and reviews the works of Italian American directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
Their personal stories testify to a wider collective novel focused around the myth and the dream of "making America." Through their pages and their critical presentation, the reader is brought to discover the literary dignity of this production, clearly linked to the popular roots of nineteenth-century Italian culture, but at the same time confronted with the traumas and the different realities of a new society. The main themes are voiced - immigration, labor conditions, family ties, the lure and snares of the big city, its multiethnicity."--BOOK JACKET.
The Cultures of Italian Migration allows the adjective "Italian" to qualify people's movements along diverse trajectories and temporal dimensions. Discussions on migrations to and from Italy meet in that discursive space where critical concepts like"home," "identity," "subjectivity," and "otherness" eschew stereotyping. This volume demonstrates that interpretations of old migrations are necessary in order to talk about contemporary Italy. New migrations trace new non linear paths in the definitionof a multicultural Italy whose roots are unmistakably present throughout the centuries. Some of these essays concentrate on topics that are historically long-term, such as emigration from Italy to the Americas and southern Pacific Ocean. Others focus on the more contemporary phenomena of immigration to Italy from other parts of the world, including Africa. This collection ultimately offers an invitation to seek out new and different modes of analyzing the migratory act.
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 obj...
The influence of Italians in American cuisine, industry, sports, entertainment, and language is profound. Using photographs to illustrate more than a century of Italian experiences in the United States, the author provides an intimate and informed glimpse into the history of prejudice, hardship, celebration, and success faced by this rich Mediterranean people. A celebration of common men and women alongside notable Italian American celebrities and public figures, this book is a cultural photo album.--From publisher description.
The Italian/American Experience represents a meaningful attempt to inform Italian Americans about their group's varied experiences in America. This collection of eleven works offers readers an in-depth view of Italian American culture and heritage.
This innovative book investigates the process through which ethnic minorities penetrate into higher echelons of political power: specifically, how they succeed in getting elected to the U.S. Congress. Analysts today see ethnic politicians largely in relation to their collectivities, but by actually studying what ethnic minority politicians do and the issues they have faced, Jiménez's book offers an original perspective of analysis. Jiménez utilizes a ground-breaking comparative dataset of elected members of Congress organized upon the basis of national origin, the first available. Using the cases of Mexican-Americans and Italian-Americans, Jimenez analyzes and compares the different ways t...