This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Italian American Culture_SP18

Introduction

This book is dedicated to the final projects developed in a course offered by Professor Clarissa Clò at San Diego State University, entitled "Italian American Culture". In the course we studied selected Italian American cultural texts and representations form novels, to films, music, and criticism – roughly spanning the historical arc of the 20th century. Some of these texts included canonical novels like Christ in Concrete (1939) by Pietro Di Donato and Ask the Dust (1939) by John Fante, Lorenzo Madalena’s Confetti for Gino (1959), set in San Diego's Italian neighborhood, as well as films like Francis Ford Coppola’s The GodfatherPart I and II (1972-1974), Saturday Night Fever (1977) featuring a young John Travolta and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) and Moonstruck (1987) starring Cher and Nicholas Cage, and Stanley Tucci's Big Night (1996).Each primary source was accompanied by critical companion pieces (secondary sources) by notable scholars in the field. During the course of Spring semester 2018 we examined the role of these literary and popular images of Italian Americans in the construction of both Italian American identities as well as the general public perception of these identities. Some of the topics discussed included the contributions of Italian Americans to American culture; their contradictory desire to assimilate to the dominant “white” culture despite discrimination; the role of women and the family; the forms of conflict and alliance with other groups. Such themes were analyzed within a theoretical framework attentive to race, ethnicity, and national formations, gender relations, and sexual identities.

The diverse material we studied encouraged us to consider how definitions of America and Americans, as well as versions of the American dream, change when we place Italian American culture and experience in all its complexity, from discrimination to assimilation, not on the margins, but at the center of US national identity formation, so as to test French philosopher Paul Virilio's provocative statement that "perhaps… ultimately, the United States is more Italian than Dutch, German, Russian, Spanish, and even more Italian than Wasp" (from Voices of Italian America by Martino Marazzi, p. 15). Similarly, we engaged with notions of ethnicity, authenticity, and nationality. Questions of race, class, gender, origin, sexuality, citizenship and masculinity remained at the center of our discussions throughout the course.

These were the stated goals of the course:

to analyze the contribution of Italian American culture to American society.
to explore the complexity and diversity of Italian American identities represented in society and in cultural productions.
to recognize, interpret and critique the strategies used by Italian American authors and their impact and implication for their community and society at large.
to compare and contrast images and ideas produced by Italian American authors about themselves and their community and those produced about them by mainstream Italian and American societies.
to identify and interpret the tensions and conflict within the Italian American community itself over values, meaning, ideals, gender, sexuality, education, regional diversity.
to identify and interpret collaborations or conflicts of the Italian American community with other ethnic or racial communities.

We began by answering the following the following questions: What does Italian American mean to us? What makes us think of Italian American culture and what are we associating with Italian American culture?

In the gallery are some of the answers we tossed around on the first day of class.

Introduction

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page references: