Table Of ContentITALIAN AND ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES
Italian Americans in Film
Establishing and Challenging
Italian American Identities
Edited by
Daniele Fioretti · Fulvio Orsitto
Italian and Italian American Studies
Series Editor
Stanislao G. Pugliese
Hofstra University
Hempstead, NY, USA
This series brings the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American his-
tory, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of special-
ists, general readers, and students. Featuring works on modern Italy
(Renaissance to the present) and Italian American culture and society by
established scholars as well as new voices, it has been a longstanding force
in shaping the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American Studies by
re-emphasizing their connection to one another.
Editorial Board
Rebecca West, University of Chicago, USA
Josephine Gattuso Hendin, New York University, USA
Fred Gardaphé, Queens College, CUNY, USA
Phillip V. Cannistraro†, Queens College and the Graduate School,
CUNY, USA
Alessandro Portelli, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy
William J. Connell, Seton Hall University, USA
Daniele Fioretti • Fulvio Orsitto
Editors
Italian Americans
in Film
Establishing and Challenging Italian American
Identities
Editors
Daniele Fioretti Fulvio Orsitto
Department of French, Italian, and Georgetown University
Classical Studies Fiesole, Italy
Miami University
Oxford, OH, USA
ISSN 2635-2931 ISSN 2635-294X (electronic)
Italian and Italian American Studies
ISBN 978-3-031-06464-7 ISBN 978-3-031-06465-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06465-4
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We would like to thank our families for their constant support and never-
ending patience.
We would also like to thank all the scholars who, in the last decades, have
created and shaped the field of Italian American Studies. Without their
work and their inspiration, this book would not exist. Their writings have
been a constant source of inspiration for us and for the authors of the
chapters that constitute this volume. It is impossible to list all the names that
now allow us to be standing on the shoulders of giants but we would, at least,
thank Anthony Julian Tamburri, Fred L. Gardaphé, Paolo A. Giordano,
Anna Camaiti Hostert, Jonathan J. Cavallero, Pellegrino D’Acierno,
Stanislao Pugliese, John Paul Russo, Robert Casillo, Ben Lawton, Giuliana
Muscio, Salvatore LaGumina, George DeStefano, Richard Alba, Francesca
Canadé Sautman, Ilaria Serra, and many others. We would also like to
remember the late Peter Bondanella, and acknowledge his groundbreaking
blend of Italian and Italian American studies which constitutes the
backbone of this volume.
F
oreword
What the Hell Am I Seeing Here? Representing Italian Americanness
(Whatever It Is…)
At the beginning of his seminal work on Italian American Literature,
Leaving Little Italy, Fred L. Gardaphé bluntly states that “Italian American
studies probably began the moment the first Italian immigrant wondered
to himself or herself, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’” (Gardaphé xii).
Consequently, one could say that the field of Italian American cinema
studies was established when the first Italian immigrant wondered, while
watching a movie about Italian Americans directed by an Italian American,
“What the hell am I seeing here?” What he or she was seeing was, and still
is, the attempt to represent through an audio-visual text that extremely
slippery entity which is Italian American identity, or subjectivity, or ethnic-
ity—‘Italian Americanness’ being such a complex conglomerate not only
of national, cultural, linguistic and even behavioral features but also the
end-result (never really ended, always actively in-progress) of the processes
of intersection implicating other dimensions such as race, class, gender,
and sexuality (to name just a few) that have determined the living experi-
ence of all the people variously involved in the Italian diaspora to the
United States.
In more than one way, cinema has been central to the definition of
italianità (Italianness) in the United States, as a vast array of critical stud-
ies has demonstrated.1 The most obvious reason is that—from the early
20th century to the post-World II establishment of TV and (nowadays) the
Internet as two media able to colonize global imagination—cinema has
been the privileged arena for the representations of identities, especially
vii
viii FOREWORD
those of migrants who, in the first phases of their settling in the USA,
often could neither speak nor read English (and in many cases were illiter-
ate even in their native language). However, they were able to almost fully
understand the supposedly universal language of moving pictures, which
in 1927 became ‘talkies’. Especially in the first decades of the 20th century,
the silver screen was the virtual space where Italian Americans could see
the reflection, not of the reality of an already multiethnic nation, but of
the image that dominant culture and ideology projected of the following:
1) WASP mainstream society, 2) the Italian American community and 3)
other ethnic communities. This also means that, since the very beginning,
Italian Americans have necessarily construed their own identity as a site of
confrontation, if not conflict, between a) their self-conception as both
single individuals and as members of a group caught in the process of
transition from being Italian to becoming American, and b) the often
biased and even overtly racist depiction of themselves they saw in movie
theaters—alongside other equally prejudiced and stereotyped portrayals of
‘ethnic minorities’ such as Native Americans, African Americans, Irish
Americans, Jewish Americans, Latin Americans, Asian Americans, and so
on (all of them often compared, associated and assimilated to, and con-
fused with, Italian Americans). As Peter Bondanella reminds us, the “high
water-mark of Italian emigration to the United States coincides roughly
with the rise of the cinema industry in America, and the evolution of
Hollywood Italian images reflects, to some extent, the ethnic prejudice
against this particular ethnic or minority group” (12). And when, quite
late in the history of the Italian diaspora in the United States,2 the cine-
matic representation of Italian Americans starts to be made by Italian
American directors as well—hence, inaugurating ‘true’ Italian American
cinema3—the expectations of what we should see when we watch a movie
about Italian Americans had already been severely conditioned by decades
of conventions and clichés. In this context, the fact that one of the first
movies about Italian Americans, The Italian (1915)—directed by Canadian
American Reginald C. Barker and starring Scottish-Irish American George
Beban—was originally titled The Dago speaks volumes.4
The (almost defensive) emphasis on Italian American cinema being
something about Italian Americans done by Italian Americans has under-
gone some revision in most recent times, and this has coincided with the
latest developments in the field of Italian American studies, where ‘Italian
Americanness’ has gradually taken a much less essentialist, binary and
exclusionary outlook than the one implied by a notion of migrant identity
FOREWORD ix
based only on biological descent and dislocation in a country different
from the ‘motherland’. In their introduction to one of the most recent
books on Italian American cinema, Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and Alan
J. Gravano write that the “very specific notion of ‘Italian American film-
makers’ telling stories about ‘Italian American subjects’ has thus given way
to a much more complicated understanding of ethnic spaces, identities
and movements among immigrant groups as portrayed in cinema and
other media” (2). Therefore, the Italian American experience cannot be
considered anymore (or, perhaps it should never have been conceptual-
ized in this way) as simply the product of a two-way interaction between
‘Italianness’ and ‘Americanness’, where only these two cultural spaces are
involved. In his book on “the contact zone—the edge and the overlap—
between Italian American and African American cultures” (8) in the musi-
cal field, John Gennari points out how Italian Americanness has been
shaped by the friction with a multiplicity of other ethnicities, and his is
only one of the latest manifestations of the renewed interest for the pro-
cesses of racialization of Italian migrants that were especially active between
the last decades of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th.
Paradoxically, this ‘ethnic turn’ in Italian American Studies took place
when Italian Americans had been finally and (almost…) accepted as legiti-
mate members of the American mainstream culture, more or less in the
last third of the last century.
Evidence of the successful ‘Americanization’ of Italians is a movie, or
better a series of movies, featuring Sylvester Stallone as an Italian American
working-class boxer who comes to embody all the ‘classic’ American val-
ues. In the fourth film of the Rocky franchise (1985), inaugurated in 1976
(the year of the Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, signed
in Philadelphia, the location of the movie), Rocky defends those values
against the Empire of Evil, embodied by the Soviet fighter Ivan Drago,
and ends up as a winner wrapped in the US flag. In the high tide of the
Cold War, and under a Reagan administration that was revamping
American nationalism after the humiliations of the Seventies (Vietnam,
Iran, the energy crisis…), Rocky Balboa (not exactly an Italian last name,
but anyway…) stood up as ‘the’ American hero, side by side with another
(and even more nationalistically belligerent) character also played by
Stallone, John Rambo, whom everyone thought to be an Italian American
but without giving to this ethnic dimension any importance. The fact that
Rambo is instead probably part German and part Native American further
confirms that by that time being Italian American had come to be so
x FOREWORD
completely identified with being American that it could even assimilate
and ‘melt’ that identity with other ethnicities.5 Besides, in the 1970s
Hollywood had started being colonized by Italian American directors
such as Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese, who first garnered pub-
lic success and critical acclaim with movies about Italian Americans (such
as, for instance, The Godfather and Mean Streets)6 and then mostly turned
to ‘non-ethnic’ topics7—not to speak of other Italian American directors
(Brian De Palma, Michael Cimino, John Dante) who rarely dealt with the
Italian American ‘matters’ in their whole career.
Hence, it was precisely at the moment when the members of the Italian
diaspora to the United States started to be recognized by mainstream cul-
ture as fully Americanized that the field of Italian American studies started
to bloom. Simultaneously, many academics also took a backward glance at
a past that had been more or less consciously redacted so as not to include
(or, at least, not to spotlight), the long history of racialization and margin-
alization Italian migrants had to endure until World War II or even later.
Starting with David A.J. Richards’s Italian American: The Racializing of
an Ethnic Identity (1999), in the last two decades or so the issue of Italian
Americans as ethnic subjects has been variously dealt with by scholars like
Joseph P. Cosco (2003), Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (2003),
Thomas Guglielmo (2003), William J. Connell and Fred L. Gardaphé
(2010), Stefano Luconi (2012, 2016), Peter G. Vellon (2014, 2018),
Samuele F.S. Pardini (2017). All of them have contributed to redefining
the notion of Italian American identity, opening up a binary orientation
already questioned by Anthony Tamburri in his statement about the need
to discard “any notion of universality or absoluteness about the regulated
use of the hyphen in adjectival phrases denoting national origin, ethnicity,
race, or gender” (Tamburri 18)—so that the substitution of the hyphen
with a slash (‘Italian/American’) would better indicate the oscillation/
alternation/conflict between whatever we mean by ‘Italian’ and
‘American,’ and also create a rift that could allow the intervention of fur-
ther dimensions.
Within this wider horizon, one that must include and interconnect, as
William Boelhower claims, three different perspectives: the cisatlantic, the
transatlantic, and the circumatlantic. The cisatlantic view focuses on the
local and idiosyncratic peculiarities of the Italian American communities,
such as the ‘little Italies’, but cannot ignore the transatlantic context, since
“Little Italy’s cultural ecology is singular precisely because of the intersec-
tions and trajectories that connect it to a local, regional, or even national
