How continual immigration changes Italian American art and culture
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.
"Laura E. Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra have constellated exacting, often revelatory treatments of the 'rebooting of Italian America' from 1945 to present: radio-conducted familial intimacies, an iconography of luscious Italian female beauty, the U.S. conquests of Italian cuisine, the brain drain of Italian elites into the American academy, and more. Volume two of New Italian Migrations to the United States is of timely value not only to Italian Americanists but to all scholars of late-century cultural flows, which turn out to be globally incorporative and transformatively procreative not despite but because they are ethnic specific and mass-mediated."--Thomas J. Ferraro, author of Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America
"Carefully grounding their analyses in the historical and socio-political contexts of the Italian diasporic exodus to the United Studies, the anthology's contributors examine the cultural work by and about Italian immigrants from 1945 to the present. In six engaging essays, they establish the critical vocabulary needed to chart the range of expressive forms that are forging contemporary Italian American identities across arts, media and communities while testifying to the on-going vitality and impact of Italian Americana for the globalized world of the twenty-first century."--Norma Bouchard, coauthor of Italy and the Mediterranean: Words, Sounds, and Images of the Post-Cold War Era
"The importance of this collection lies not merely in its historical testimony to the centrality of migration in the making of modernity and the contemporary United States, but also, and most profoundly, in drawing us into the multiple threads deeply woven into the artistic and cultural understandings of a world always unwilling to recognize the profound injustices on which it continues to base its authority."--Iain Chambers, author of Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity
