Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America

Narrative bibliography

narrative bibliography I was once asked by an undergraduate enrolled in an Italian cooking class with me, what was the best Italian restaurant in town? Without hesitation, I answered, “China One” (a local Chinese restaurant). The student asking the question thought I was being facetious, but I wasn’t kidding: the Italians I know would seek out the best available food regardless of national origins and order off the home-cooked part of the menu (Taiwanese: clay pot stews with taro root). As luck would have it, another student in the class, of Chinese extraction, gave me the public high five: “Yeah, man, even my folks from San Francisco love that restaurant .” Anticipating the question, then, “Where should a reader of Feeling Italian go next?” I’m tempted to say, to Leslie Fiedler’s The Jew in the American Novel (New York: Herzl Press, 1959) or Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues (NewYork: McGraw-Hill, 1976) or Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation (New York: Viking, 1992), which are books that reach out from the academy to the public at large, speaking with style and grace, righteousness and chutzpah, of Jewish America, African America, and Mexican America, respectively. To which my mother would respond, “Thomas, you’re not being very helpful.” In fact, there is a treasure trove of materials, most of it smart and approachable, regarding the more proximate contents and contexts of this book: Southern Italian and U.S. immigrant social history, which is its background; the national scene of Italian American arts and letters, which is its primary subject; and the mass-mediated interplay of ethnicities , which is its greater import. I’ve been excited by Italian American participation in American books and movies since I was twelve years old, when a call from my Great Uncle Tony in Long Beach, New York, prompted my father, a frugal child of the Depression, to buy his first and only hardcover copy of a novel: The Godfather . I am not alone in this. Pellegrino D’Acierno has blessed us with a single-volume encyclopedia of great energy and range, The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts (New York: Garland, 1999), which is what its subtitle says—an introductory accompaniment —and more. The handy and beautifully produced D’Acierno volume 235 combines a timeline of the Italian experience in America (compiled by Stanislao Pugliese), overviews by many of the founders of Italian American literary studies (Robert Viscusi, Fred L. Gardaphé, Helen Barolini, Stephen Sartarelli, Mary Jo Bona), and several intriguing cultural meditations (Richard Gambino, Frank Lentricchia, Camille Paglia, the anthropological team of Malpezzi and Clements) with seminal scholarship that D’Acierno researched and wrote himself: a wonderful cultural lexicon, a suggestive theoretical introduction, and powerful essays on film, music, and the visual arts (including color plates)—all of which are illuminating in ways that, quite frankly, you can find nowhere else. Where to go next is in part a function of what you are seeking, but let me first recommend several gateway texts. Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans (Garden City, NY: Doubleday , 1974) is a purposively friendly cultural overview—set in history but leaning toward sociology and social psychology—of the first three generations of Italian America, especially in the Northeastern industrial sector. The previous generation’s intellectual handbook to Italian America , Blood of My Blood has aged surprisingly well, especially as a barometer of the new ethnic consciousness, when Italian Americans felt caught between a rock (the felt critique of black nationalism, the antiwar movement , and women’s liberation) and a hard place (on the verge of the great breakthrough into the upper-middle classes but not there yet). Humbert S. Nelli’s entry on “Italians” in Stephan Thernstrom’s Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980) is an efficient historical overview, with a minimalist but useful bibliography. Rudolph J. Vecoli’s “The Coming of Age of the Italian Americans: 1945–1974,” Ethnicity 5 (1978), 119–47, from the dean of Italian American historians, provides vital periodization with demographic rigor. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience (New York: Harper Collins, 1992) is a fulsome narrative history (with another capacious bibliography) in common tongue, by Jerre Mangione, the accomplished memoirist and editor of the Federal Writer’s project, and Ben Morreale, creative writer and man of letters; Gay Talese’s Unto the Sons (New York: Knopf, 1992), by one of...