Feeling Italian : The Art of Ethnicity in America

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.Winner of a 2006 American Book Award from the Before Columbus FoundationFerraro maintains a breezy, journalistic style that has produced an easy and entertaining read. His work may give hope to people of other ethnicities who presently suffer from isolation and alienation on the part of the general American public. --Multicultural ReviewFerraro traces the 'evolution and persistence' of an identifiable Italian American identity, from the time of widespread Italian immigration in the late 1800s through popular mediated portrayals of Italian Americans such as those found in The Sopranos television series. The book is an important contribution not only to Italian American studies, but to the understanding of ethnicity in the 21st-century US. --ChoiceThis inspired, sophisticated, provoking book should command the attention of anybody interested in American Italianness in particular or the cultural consequences of ethnicity in general. Joseph Stella and Frank Sinatra, Maria Barbella and Giancarlo Esposito, Madonna and the good people who brought you the Corleones and Sopranos--they and others appear here, often seen in startlingly fresh ways, as creators and exemplars of the aesthetic Tom Ferraro calls 'feeling Italian.' Wise, funny, contagiously enthusiastic, Ferraro takes us far beyond the narrow pieties of the identity police or anti-defamation types as he traces the development of a widely accessible American cultural style that still bears the marks of distinctively Italian ways of making do and making sense. --Carlo Rotella, author of Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust BeltôOriginal and deeply right. There is no other book that digs so deeply into the matter at hand, and does so with such eloquence and ferocity of intellect.ö --Jay Parini, author of Passage to Liberty: The Story of Italian Immigration and the Rebirth of AmericaThe lesson that each of us must choose of the narratives carefully: You can let the Olive Garden sum you up; or you can, like Ferraro, remind yourself that it'sj ust another version of mass-culture reductivism and stereotyping. Being Italian (or Polish or Jewish or African American), Ferraro reminds us, is not about the all-you-can eat breadsticks.--Duke MagazineSouthern Italian emigration to the United States peaked a full century ago--descendents are now fourth and fifth generation, dispersed from their old industrial neighborhoods, professionalized, and fully integrated into the ômelting pot.ö Surely the social historians are right: Italian Americans are fading into the twilight of their ethnicity. So, why is the American imagination enthralled by The Sopranos, and other portraits of Italian-ness?Italian American identity, now a mix of history and fantasy, flesh-and-bone people and all-too-familiar caricature, still has something to teach us, including why each of us, as citizens of the U.S. twentieth century and its persisting cultures, are to some extent already Italian. Contending that the media has become the primary vehicle of Italian sensibilities, Ferraro explores a series of books, movies, paintings, and records in ten dramatic vignettes. Featured cultural artifacts run the gamut, from the paintings of Joseph Stella and the music of Frank Sinatra to The GodfatherÆs enduring popularity and MadonnaÆs Italian background. In a prose style as vivid as his subjects, Ferraro fashions a sardonic love song to the art and iconography of Italian America.

Thomas J. Ferraro is Associate Professor of English at Duke University.