Hybrid Nation

Hybrid Nation Fred Gardaphé Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America Thomas J. Ferrara New York University Press http://www.nyupress.org 272 pages; paper, $21.00 Thomas J. Ferrara, whose previous works include a study of ethnic American literature, Ethnic Passages (1993), and the edited collection Catholic Lives, Contemporary America ( 1 997), writes about Italian American culture to educate and entertain, reaching across the sometimes vast wasteland of academia to present a study that's accessible to the general reader. In ten separate essays, Ferraro covers Italian American history of the late nineteenth through the twentieth century by examining a number of cultural actors, acts, and artifacts that Americans of Italian descent have contributed over the years. His thesis is that in becoming Americans, Italian immigrants have Italianized the United States in ways that transcend what we're familiar with in the leftover Little Italys. It was in the early Little Italys— which Ferraro sees as "built in accordance with ancient habits (la via vecchia [the old way], including fierce familialism, low expectations, and distrust of authority) and new necessities (including chain migration, language barriers, and restricted housing)"—that Italians created a hybrid culture, which soon caught the fancy of the "Mericans," as Italians called the natives who greeted them with scorn and discrimination. The study opens with the story ofthe infamous Maria Barbella, "the murdering seamstress," who in 1895 killed a man who had preyed upon her and garnered international attention in her trial. Ferraro argues that feeling Italian begins when the walls of Little Italy give in to inside,pressures of wanting to assimilate and the pressure of curious outsiders looking in. Ferraro analyzes both the historical record and Idanna Pucci's documentary novel, The Trials ofMaria Barbella ( 1 997), to show that maintaining the southern Italian sense ofhonor provoked a crime that most Americans could only imagine. In the process, Barbella gets away "in cultural as well as literal terms— with murder." What follows are similarly smooth analyses of Joseph Stella's New York City and Catholic paintings, which he sees as "prescient as a pictorialization of urban modernity's future"; Pietro di Donato's 1937 short story "Christ in Concrete," which eventually became a novel ofthe same name; Mario Puzo's best novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964); the musical mystique of Frank Sinatra; Puzo and Coppola's Godfather'?, (1969 and 1972, respectively); the romantic film Moonstruck (1987); the career of pop diva Madonna; racial issues surrounding the acting career of the African-Italian American Giancarlo Esposito; and finally Stanley Tucci's Big Night (1996). He concludes with a brief gloss of The Sopranos to show us just how Italian the United States has become since the early days of mass immigration, and that "Italian forms of solidarity and cultural retention and ethnic reinvention have become the most attractive of all such forms to most Americans, and thereby the most revealing of American fantasies...." The essays here all reflect Ferraro's ability to synthesize major critical thought and apply it to his subject in unique and innovative ways. Be it religion, art, music, or film, Ferraro covers each subject with the background that comes only from good research and meditative thinking about the subject. What's remarkable is Ferraro's ability to capture the themes of his subjects not only through his ideas, but through his own words. Check out the way he opens his essay on "Christ in Concrete": Once upon a time in America, the swarms of hard-hatted, bronzed men in cheap clothing with dark unruly hair carrying lunch-buckets, comfortably convivial with one another while fiercely devoted —from all signs—to family, too earthy and hard-bitten it would seem for belief in God, never mind organized religion, yet sporting unmistakable crucifixes, garrulous even in public in a language more liquid than English, but rougher than school-taught Romance tongues, doing all the construction work, skilled and unskilled, were not South Mexican, not Central American as they are now, but Southern Italian and Sicilian: guineas, wops, and dagos. This is their story. The language here echoes the style and sound of di Donato's unique diction, one distilled through Italian and...