Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge by John Gennari (review)

In Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge, John Gennari argues that "the intersection between Italian America and African America [is] a space of hopeful encounter and wary suspicion, danger, sometimes violent collision, and magnificent, joyous collusion" (8). Gennari explores these spaces, situating his study both in contrast to and in conversation with white ethnic studies, stating: "I find it ironic that critical race studies, in spite of its celebration of difference and its stated intention of deconstructing Eurocentric binaries, persists in thinking and talking about a singular, reified whiteness" (15). Gennari sets out to complicate our understanding of Italian American cultural production through cultural, literary, and historical analyses, exploring the interstices or "contact zones" (8) where African Americans and Italian Americans have met quite literally—in music, neighborhoods, labor history, marriages, friendships, and artistic productions. Just as both groups have suffered through America's sordid race history—for example, the Italian immigrants lynched in New Orleans in 1890, accused of "murdering a popular police chief" (26)—Gennari claims that both groups have also been praised, admired, and imitated by Americans in popular culture.

For every lynching and abusive labor situation an Italian immigrant experienced in the early part of the twentieth century and for every shut door or innuendo of mob affiliation, Gennari argues that Italian figures have been heralded and imitated by non-Italians: the romantic lover Rudolph Valentino, the opera singer Enrico Caruso, the gangster chic of Frank Sinatra, and the lovability of Louis Prima have captured the American imagination. At the same time, in the popular American imagination, Italian men, "like black men, were feared, reviled, denigrated, and subjected to ritual violence" (27). Gennari organizes his study around this phenomenon of America's love-hate relationship with Italian American culture as the starting point for the deeper relationship he sees between Italian and black culture in America and for the role the state of Italianness has played in the American imagination as a mediator between "black and white, alien and citizen, outsider and insider, high culture and low culture, masculine and feminine." He argues that historically, Italian Americans have occupied this "liminal and transactional space in the ethnoracial order of the United States" (9).

The study is organized around five chapters engaging several themes: music (chapter 1, "Top Wop"), food-ways (chapter 2, "Everybody Eats"), film and television (chapter 3, "Spike and His Goombahs"), sports (chapter 4, "Sideline Schtick"), and final notes (chapter 5, "Tutti"). As the chapter titles imply, the traditional structure reveals an effort toward a more accessible, hybrid scholarship—one that Gennari calls a "sensuous scholarship" (15)—that layers and nests various close cultural analyses within and around personal anecdotes, and sometimes more peripheral observations. On one hand, this approach makes the book a fun and interesting read; the reader can dip into even smaller portions of chapters and learn much about Italian American studies, jazz history, and so forth. On the other hand, although some of these comparative and nested readings can be fascinating, they do not always convey a cohesive argument either about the contact zones or the mediation of Italian American figures. For example, the comparative reading of shared qualities in the music of Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra is interesting but brings up many other issues about these two artists that cannot be fully explored in one study.

A good example of Gennari's "sensuous" scholarship, which I read as a hybridized academic and personal scholarship, is his discussion of the "top wop," Frank Sinatra, in chapter 1. He admits to romanticizing Sinatra "as a noble crusader who insisted on the desegregation of the hotels where he performed and [who] could always be counted on to host a fundraiser for the civil rights cause." Yet at the intersection of African and Italian cultural identity—such as when P. Diddy refers to himself as "the black Sinatra"—it is not Sinatra...