Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities

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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. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. All Things Italian: Italian American Consumers, the Transnational Formation of Taste, and the Commodification of Difference Part I: Immigrants Encounter and Remake U.S. Consumer Society: The Shaping of Italian American Identities Through Commodities and Commercial Leisure, 1900– 1930 1. Visibly Fashionable: The Changing Role of Clothes in the Everyday Life of Italian American Immigrant Women 2. Making Space for Domesticity: Household Goods in Working-Class Italian American Homes, 1900–1940 3. In Italy Everyone Enjoys It—Why Not in America? Italian Americans and Consumption in Transnational Perspective During the Early Twentieth Century 4. Sovereign Consumption: Italian Americans’ Transnational Film Culture in 1920s New York City 5. Consuming La Bella Figura: Charles Atlas and American Masculinity, 1910–1940 6. Radical Visions and Consumption: Culture and Leisure among the Early Twentieth-Century Italian American Left Part II: 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: Sense of Place, Politics of Style, and Racial Crossovers in Postwar New York City 10. Consuming Italian Americans: Invoking Ethnicity in the Buying and Selling of Guido Part III: Consuming Italian American Identities in the Multicultural Age, 1980 to the Present 11. The Double Life of the Italian Suit: Italian Americans and the “Made in Italy” Label 12. Sideline Shtick: The Italian American Basketball Coach and Consumable Images of Racial and Ethnic Masculinity 13. The Immigrant Enclave as Theme Park: Culture, Capital, and Urban Change in New York’s Little Italies 14. We Are Family: Ethnic Food Marketing and the Consumption of Authenticity in Italian-Themed Chain Restaurants Notes List of Contributors Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z Пустая страница