A fascinating exploration of consumer culture in Italian American
history and life, the role of consumption in the production of ethnic
identities, and the commodification of cultural difference
How do immigrants and their children forge their identities in a new
land--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.
