Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora ed. by Edvige Giunta and Joseph Sciorra (review)

Fabric production and its elaboration through needlework and tailoring figure centrally in the shared histories, cultures, trade networks, and economies of the Mediterranean. Textiles and needlework also prove to be portable commodities and skills that cross over from the Mediterranean, to ensure the survival of women immigrants and their families elsewhere. Focusing primarily on the experience and history of Italian American women immigrants and their descendants, this anthology contributes to our understanding of the cultural significance of needlework as a semiotic system. Prominent in the field of Italian Americana and the Italian diaspora, editors Edvige Giunta, a literary specialist, and Joseph Sciorra, an anthropologist and folklorist, join forces here to offer this interdisciplinary exploration of Italian immigrant women’s needlework (biancheria) for the bridal chest, or corredo, as material culture.

With the Italian American experience of the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries as its central focus, this anthology intersperses academic scholarship with poetry, memoir, art, and photography. Its innovative format reveals how women’s needlework constitutes “a symbolic and cultural trace of the immigrant experience . . . a marker of identity, a cultural touchstone as powerful as pasta and Neapolitan music” (4). To my mind, this anthology thus provides an exemplary, more inclusive model for discussing cultural hybridity at the grassroots of women’s culture. Providing a convincing and accessible point of departure, the memoirs in this anthology are invaluable for characterizing the dynamics of this hybridity. Particularly notable in this regard are Christine F. Zinni’s “Stitches in Air: Needlework as Spiritual Practice and Service in Batavia, New York” (74–98) and Joan L. Savarino’s “Embroidery as Inscription in the Life of a Calabrian Immigrant Woman” (281–312). These essays show, in various ways, how needlework exhibits the individual creativity of practitioners, while also intricately tying them to both their cultures of origin and the community of women needleworkers in their local immigrant or parish communities. However, needlework can also occasion interchange and relationships with surrounding Anglo culture; such exchanges can occur not only with other craftswomen and their traditions, but also with the wider communities and workspaces that all working-class women, both Italian American and Anglo, share.

Overall, the multi-generic mix of readings renders this anthology both academically rigorous and yet more widely accessible: the editors’ introduction (3–24) and the subsequent academic articles provide the important historical and social background of women’s needlework in Italy and in the diaspora. The memoirs, poetry, and visuals render the needlework as site of language, memory, and identity more vivid and even intimate to a general audience. Composed largely by Italian Americans, the creative and academic works reinforce one another as “situated” reflections on the ties that bind disparate cultures through needlework.

Each of the anthology’s five parts adopts a specific focus, which enables selective reading: “Threads of Women” (“the intergenerational connections and disconnections at the heart of needlework” [18]); “Skills and Artistry” (“the creative component of biancheria through recovery and reexamination” [18]); “Factory Girls” (the transnational “industrialized setting” of Italian needlework [18]); “Environmental Sites” (needlework and “the sense of place” [19]); “Lost, Discarded, Reclaimed” (“the memory work that needlework prompts and sometimes demands . . . immigrant loss but also hybrid reinvention” [19]).

As a third-generation descendant of immigrants and wife of a first-generation immigrant, all from south-central Italian villages or provincial towns, I enjoyed reading this rich anthology as a privileged occasion to recall warmly but also interrogate deeply the significance of my foremothers’ needlework. I myself have treasured needlework, made by my grandmother, her mother, and my mother-in-law, all expert seamstresses, that creates the filo, or thread, that links me and my twenty-first-century family to my grandparents and to my husband’s family of origin. For this reason, I find compelling the editors’ and contributors’ root supposition...