Feeling Italian
Thomas J. Ferraro
2006 American Book Award, presented by the Before Columbus Foundation
Southern Italian emigration to the United States peaked a full century ago—;descendents are now fourth and fifth generation, dispersed from their old industrial neighborhoods, professionalized, and fully integrated into the “melting pot.” Surely the social historians are right: Italian Americans are fading into the twilight of their ethnicity. So, why is the American imagination enthralled by The Sopranos, and other portraits of Italian-ness?
Italian American identity, now a mix of history and fantasy, flesh-and-bone people and all-too-familiar caricature, still has something to teach us, including why each of us, as citizens of the U.S. twentieth century and its persisting cultures, are to some extent already Italian. Contending that the media has become the primary vehicle of Italian sensibilities, Ferraro explores a series of books, movies, paintings, and records in ten dramatic vignettes. Featured cultural artifacts run the gamut, from the paintings of Joseph Stella and the music of Frank Sinatra to The Godfather’s enduring popularity and Madonna’s Italian background. In a prose style as vivid as his subjects, Ferraro fashions a sardonic love song to the art and iconography of Italian America.
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About Thomas J. Ferraro
Reviews for Feeling Italian
Multicultural Review
"Feeling Italian is a smart book, one that makes the reader think beyond the usual ways of looking at whats Italian about the US."
American Book Review
"Original and deeply right. There is no other book that digs so deeply into the matter at hand, and does so with such eloquence and ferocity of intellect."
Jay Parini,author of Passage to Liberty: The Story of Italian Immigration and the Rebirth of America "This inspired, sophisticated, provoking book should command the attention of anybody interested in American Italianness in particular or the cultural consequences of ethnicity in general. Joseph Stella and Frank Sinatra, Maria Barbella and Giancarlo Esposito, Madonna and the good people who brought you the Corleones and Sopranos;they and others appear here, often seen in startlingly fresh ways, as creators and exemplars of the aesthetic Tom Ferraro calls & feeling Italian. Wise, funny, contagiously enthusiastic, Ferraro takes us far beyond the narrow pieties of the identity police or anti-defamation types as he traces the development of a widely accessible American cultural style that still bears the marks of distinctively Italian ways of making do and making sense."
Carlo Rotella,author of Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt "Ferraro traces the 'evolution and persistence' of an identifiable Italian American identity, from the time of widespread Italian immigration in the late 1800s through popular mediated portrayals of Italian Americans such as those found in The Sopranos television series. The book is an important contribution not only to Italian American studies, but to the understanding of ethnicity in the 21st-century US."
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