Title
Making Italian America : Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities / ed. by Simone Cinotto.
ISBN
9780823256273
Published
New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2014]
Copyright
©2014
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (352 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers
10.1515/9780823256273 doi
Dewey Decimal Classification
305.851073
Summary
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 U.S. history and the transfer of cultural patterns, Making Italian America illuminates the crucial role that consumption has had in shaping the ethnic culture and diasporic identities of Italians in America. It also illustrates vividly why and how those same identities-incorporated in commodities, commercial leisure, and popular representations-have become the object of desire for millions of American and global consumers.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
Series
Critical Studies in Italian America
Available in Other Form
print 9780823256242
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
introduction. All Things Italian
part one. Immigrants Encounter and Remake U.S. Consumer Society The Shaping of Italian American Identities Through Commodities and Commercial Leisure, 1900- 1930
1. Visibly Fashionable.
2. Making Space for Domesticity
3. In Italy Everyone Enjoys It-Why Not in America?
4. Sovereign Consumption
5. Consuming La Bella Figura
6. Radical Visions and Consumption
part two. The Politics and Style of Italian American Consumerism, 1930- 1980
7. Italian Americans, the New Deal State, and the Making of Citizen Consumers
8. Italian Americans, Consumerism, and the Cold War in Transnational Perspective
9. Italian Doo-Wop
10. Consuming Italian Americans
part three. Consuming Italian American Identities in the Multicultural Age, 1980 to the Present
11. The Double Life of the Italian Suit
12. Sideline Shtick
13. The Immigrant Enclave as Theme Park
14. We Are Family
Notes
Contributors
Index
