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introduction Listening with an Accent Joseph Sciorra Folklore must not be considered an eccentricity, an oddity or a picturesque element, but as something which is very serious and is to be taken seriously. antonio gramsci, ‘‘observations on folklore’’1 Their [the descendants of Italian immigrants] italianità—where it has persisted at all—resides in the humble details of everyday life, not in the glories of any nation or its state. donna gabaccia, italy’s many diasporas2 In March 1985, a parish priest had introduced me to Vincenza after I contacted him about my research on yard shrines and domestic altars among New York City’s Italian Americans. As a young ‘‘urban folklorist’’ at the onset of my career and new to the practice of fieldwork—ethnographic research with living people—Vincenza was everything I could have hoped for. A diminutive septuagenarian wearing a floral house dress and slippers graciously greeted me at the door of her finished basement kitchen in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where she spent most of her days. At first blush, I couldn’t help but view her as ‘‘a little, old Italian lady.’’ She was classic, I thought. Vincenza was the perfect person to interview for my documentation on religious material culture.3 She had assembled and maintained an altar in her bedroom, complete with embroidered cloth and photographs of her extended family tucked in the crooks of the multiple plaster statues of the Virgin Mary and the saints. She had told me on the telephone that she had ‘‘received the grace,’’ a miraculous intervention that had saved her young son’s life several decades ago. It was too good to be true. I felt as if I had hit the jackpot by arranging this interview . I gloated. I knew exactly what to expect. As I sat at the kitchen table and began setting up my tape recorder, Vincenza shuf- fled toward me, asking in her pronounced Brooklyn accent, ‘‘Do you want some coffee? I made these cookies this morning.’’ Ah, I thought, I know the routine, the cultural script I had learned as a child: Say no to be polite, and then she’ll ask again. The norm for this obligatory ritual was an exchange in triplicate: offer-decline, offer-decline, offeraccept . My God, I thought, this is like ‘‘Italian-American Folkways 101.’’ ‘‘No, thank you. I’m good,’’ I answered. 1 2 Joseph Sciorra And with that, Vincenza turned from me, quietly placing the dish of homemade cookies back on the counter top. ‘‘So, what is it you want to know?’’ she asked. I begin this collection of essays on Italian-American folklore with my encounter with Vincenza to draw attention to popular perceptions and representations of vernacular cultural expressions of Italian Americans. Elderly women dressed in black reciting prayers sotto voce, men ardently playing on a dirt-packed bocce court, Sunday dinners with cornucopic bowls of spaghetti and meatballs in red sauce, and saint statues festooned with dollar bills and paraded through urban streets are cultural referents resurrected in myriad cinematic renderings and journalistic accounts. These seemingly innocuous representations are emblematic types and scenarios that trigger immediate and ingrained assumptions about people’s beliefs, politics, aesthetics, values, and behaviors that leave little room for nuance and elaboration. It was just this set of presuppositions that allowed me to categorize Vincenza as a known type—the little, old Italian lady— whose subjectivity and history I presumed to know. The estrangement of the ethnographic moment disrupted my normative notions, demanding reassessment and engaged listening. This collection offers a similar opportunity to re-examine and rethink what we know about Italian Americans. Community-based knowledge and vernacular aesthetic practices are a rich source for creativity and meaning in everyday life. People’s ability and willingness to create and reproduce certain cultural modes connect them to social entities such as the family, the neighborhood, and the amorphous and fleeting communities that emerge in largescale festivals and now on the Internet. Creative forms that mark perceived differences based on class, race, gender, sexuality, and so on are some of the most entrenched and powerful expressions of group identity.4 For example, Catholic devotional processions in heterogeneous urban neighborhoods are deeply felt religious celebrations mapping and reinforcing the physical and psychological boundaries between insider and outsider .5 Expressive culture—including foodways, music, dance, material culture, architecture , religious practices, and verbal arts—is how people articulate, examine, critique, and reproduce deeply felt values and meanings. These forms emerge from and in dialogue...

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