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Conclusion: The Art of Ethnicity in America
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Conclusion The Art of Ethnicity in America “But please, Mr. Armstrong, just what is ‘jazz’?” “Oh, my dear lady, if I have to explain it, you’re never going to get it.” —apocryphal Italian immigration to the United States peaked in 1907. Almost a century later, a band of Northeasterners led by David Chase (né Cesare) took the American imagination by storm with a black comedy about the Jersey mob entitled The Sopranos. The trailers made the TV show sound like the same old formula—gangsters once again—but when the episodes actually hit, genre benders with ferocious self-knowing and sardonic grace, they put everything out there (from TV and the movies to serious fiction and literary theory) to shame. The first year of The Sopranos played less like a television series than a serial novel that the nineteenth-century Londoner Charles Dickens might have written had he grown up guido in New Jersey. The story it told, satirizing upscale suburban domesticity by revealing its entanglement in the enterprise zones of postindustrial crime, places Italian Americans in the suburbs for the first time, living cheek by jowl with dentists and CEOs, while portraying their crises of confidence as fundamentally American. All over the United States, friends gathered religiously to watch episode after episode, with their VCRs running, only to pass those tapes around in compulsive delight, electing one by one to become intimates of this television family. Since then, we’ve been treated to four more 198 seasons and counting, the rumor increasingly afloat that the latest will be the last, only to be undone by a renewed corporate will to continue, by more Emmys and more kudos, even from the New Yorker and the New York Times. In the meantime, producing companion volumes to the series—naked marketing ploys, sure, but also fan-driven flights of creativity and smart, passionate commentary from various sectors of the academy—has become a cottage industry. Dozens of people have had homes built on the model of Tony and Carmella’s place. What’s been going on here? On the listserv for the American Italian Historical Association and elsewhere, irritation at the media’s ongoing obsession with the criminal stereotype struck a resonant chord among many intellectuals, who took the class associations personally: our image finally makes it into the suburbs , and we don’t even get to be white-collar criminals—the lawyers, doctors, politicians, businesswomen, and private-school administrators ripped from the headlines to people Law & Order; we may live in New Providence or Short Hills, but we’re still seen as gutter thugs, exploiting women, extorting kickbacks, and hijacking trucks! What other group is subjected to this? What other group would sit by and tolerate it? The facts are, Northern Jersey is something like a backwater in the fierce progression of ethnic succession in organized crime (the Russians are the wave of the future in the Northeast, along with the Vietnamese and the Jamaicans), while professionals of Italian ancestry can now be found conspicuously in every single form of classy endeavor: no question, that. But the politics of identity, of sameness versus difference, are complex, not only in The Sopranos portrayals on screen but also in how folks have responded to them. The paradoxes of Italian/American cross-recognition are nowhere more apparent than in how those who wear their Italianness on their sleeve—including those who have built a reputation from being most vigilant against the persisting realities of organized crime and those who have been most hurt by the lingering prejudices of mafia fear—have received the TV show. In the spring of the second season, Rudolph Giuliani, the once-controversial mayor of New York who rose to prominence as the chief prosecutor of megamobster John Gotti, and Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York who curtailed his own candidacy for the presidency—and, as importantly, the Supreme Court— conclusion 199 [44.201.24.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:00 GMT) amid the very same kind of rumors (mob connections?) that embarrassed Geraldine Ferraro (a brother, an uncle?), shared the stage to fete series star and resident genie James Gandolfini: truth be told, they confessed in public, we adore The Sopranos. That James Gandolfini, a balding potbellied barely employed actor out of Rutgers, was transformed almost overnight into a national sex symbol without having to change his accent or skip a temperamental beat (other than delivering the theatrics of violence...