New Italian migrations to the United States. Volume 2, Art and culture since 1945

This second volume of __New Italian Migrations to the United States__ continues the critical conversation with its predecessor by exploring Italian immigration to the United States from 1945 to the present, focusing on cultural expressivity, artistic productions, community engagement, and media representations. The book challenges our understanding of art and culture created by and about Italian Americans in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries by considering ongoing Italian migratory flows. Each new group of Italian migrants and their descendants creates fresh models of Italian American culture, impacts preexisting ones, and continually reboot Italian America. The essays herein focus on such topics as transnational intimacy aided by an Italian-language radio program that broadcast messages from family members in Italy, the exoticized actors like Sophia Loren and Pier Angeli who helped shape a glamorous Italian style out of images of desperate postwar poverty, the constellation of cement figures crafted by a self-taught artist outside of Detroit, a folk-revival performer who infuses tarantella with New Age and feminist tonalities, the role of immigrant cookbook writers like Marcella Hazan and Lidia Bastianich in crafting a fashionable Italian food culture, and a review of current literature on the Italian “brain drain” and its impact on university Italian Studies. The afterword discusses the nomenclature ascribed to Italian American creative writers living in Italy and the United States. 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.| Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Rebooting Italian America / Laura E. Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra 1. "Don't Forget You Have Relatives Here": Transnational Intimacy and Acoustic Communities of WOV-AM's La Grande Famiglia 2. "Hot-Blooded Eye-­talian" Women: The Lascivious and Desperate Post–World War II Italian Immigrant in U. S. Cinema 3. A Moralizing Landscape as Scenography: Silvio Barile's "Italian American Historical Artistic Museum" 4. Performing in the Italian American "Translation Zone" : Alessandra Belloni's Tarantella 5. Immigrant Tastemakers: Italian Cookbook Writers and the Transnational Formation of Taste in Postindustrial America (1973 - 2000) 6. Migration Italian Style: Charting the Contemporary U.S.–Bound Exodus (1990–2013) Afterword: Rethinking Labels: The "Italian" Writer as Exemplar, or Distinct Categories as Quixotic Contributors Index |"The volume, as a whole, is a pleasant read and a welcomed new and forward-looking perspective on Italian migration. " — Italica "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 "Editors Ruberto and Sciorra have provided an excellent resource for both students and researchers of Italian-American Studies, and of Italian Americans, whether referring to the "imaginary Italians" to whom the volume is dedicated, or the "real Italians" who grace its pages." — Quaderni d'italianistica | Laura E. Ruberto is a professor of humanities in the Arts and Cultural Studies Department at Berkeley City College. She is the author of Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women's Work in Italy and the U.S. Joseph Sciorra is the director for Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY. He is the author of Built with Faith: Italian American... "This project, edited by Joseph Sciorra and Laura Ruberto, reevaluates the political, social, and cultural significance of Italian emigration to the U.S. since World War II. Particular areas of focus are community (urban and suburban) development, politics and economics, transnationalism, the media, group identity, and expressive culture. Contributors provide critical interventions on the relationships new immigrants created with established Italian American communities, including both the primarily working class migrants in the immediate postwar period and the new professional class of migrants who began to arrive in the 1970s. The volume also assesses more generally how ongoing European migration is related to postmodern notions of white ethnicity, thus advancing conversations about the complex understanding of U.S. white ethnicity as multivalent, unstable, and at times contradictory, rather than as a fixed historical process that leads to white privilege and ethnic assimilation"-- Provided by publisher