Vulnerability in Italian American Culture by Keitel Del Rosario
One theme of our class has been the troubles of problems faced by Italian immigrants and Italian-Americans in America and the following “grand transposition-transformation in America of habits, expressions, and cultural components” (Marazzi 20). It may be the case that this transformation was caused by capitalism (Christ in Concrete, Godfather Part I and Godfather Part II, Big Night), racial relations between WASPs and Italian Americans or Italian Americans and other minorities (Do the right thing, Ask the Dust) or gender identification (Saturday Night Fever and John Gennari’s interpretation of Frank Sinatra).
Authors and directors have depicted in their works and critics have read into the same works, at least two things: 1.) the ease or difficulty and, sometimes, impossibilities of assimilation (Christ in Concrete, Vito Corleone inThe Godfather, Primo in Big Night, Ask the Dust) and 2.) the transformation of values between generations as they are affected by American values and the American immigrant environment (Michael in The Godfather, Confetti for Gino, Secondo in Big Night).
In this chapter, I would like to examine one of those values: vulnerability. To do this I take a survey, focusing on Ask the Dust, Saturday Night Fever, Godfather Part I, and Godfather Part II. I also use John Gennari's interpretation of Frank Sinatra authoritatively. With the exception of the Gennari and Saturday Night Fever, I dedicate a section to each individual work. The first part deals with Ask the Dust. The second part concerns The Godfather (Parts I and II). The final section primarily concerns Saturday Night Fever and John Gennari. My thesis is simple and descriptive: each of these works and studies depicts characters who either let themselves become vulnerable or, in bad faith, block themselves to vulnerability in order to establish what each believes to be a beneficial self-identity (see footnote one). My arguments rely on arguments from critical stances on the above works as well as the primary sources themselves.Why does my thesis matter? Recognition and identification of this element of vulnerability within these works, and works like it, and propagation of such interpretations might help breed an empathy or sympathy with others, especially immigrants and refugees, who occupy ‘Preoccupied Spaces’ (Fiore).
Notes
1. A short word on identity, which is not per se the subject of this chapter. Is there such a thing as identity? I think that we can't, through human understanding, know. But what we do know that there are individuals who create, in a Sartrean sense, 'identity' for themselves. This is the definition of identity -- created and constructed identity -- which I carry throughout this paper. The foundational, background, premises I take to this issue are from Sartre and Judith Butler. Sartre says that “I need the Other in order to realize fully all the structures of my being. The for-itself refers to the for-others” (393). This means that our facticity necessarily refers to, or is constituted by, our being-for-Others, meaning our being is partially determined by the Other’s subjectivity. In other words, what I am is partially determined by what the Other, in its subjectivity, posits me to be. Butler says, Gender Trouble, “we are constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies; we are constituted as fields of desire and physical vulnerability, at once publicly assertive and vulnerable” (18) and that she “thinks it exposes the constitutive sociality of the self, a basis for thinking a political community of a complex order” (18). By the vulnerability of our bodies, she means, in a Foucaultian sense, that it is our bodies which are primarily vulnerable, as opposed to our psyche. To her second claim, and specific to this project, I would add that included in our 'constitutive sociality of the self' is a basis of thinking of a political community in which we can think of racial relations and identity.
