Italian Americans in Film

Establishing and Challenging Italian American Identities

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Edited by Daniele Fioretti and Fulvio Orsitto

Type: Studies
Subject: Countries > United States
Keywords: United States, Italian Americans
Publishing date: 2022
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Collection: Italian and Italian American Studies
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 309 pages
6 x 8 ¼ inches (15 x 21 cm)

ISBN

978-3-031-06464-7

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Book Presentation:
This book examines how Italian Americans have been represented in cinema, from the depiction of Italian migration in New Orleans in the 1890s (Vendetta) to the transition from first- to second-generation immigrants (Ask the Dust), and from the establishment of the stereotype of the Italian American gangster (Little Caesar, Scarface) to its re-definition (Mean Streets), along with a peculiar depiction of Italian American masculinity (Marty, Raging Bull). For many years, Italian migration studies in the United States have commented on the way cinema contributed to the creation of an identifiable Italian American identity. More recently, scholars have recognized the existence of a more nuanced plurality of Italian American identities that reflects social and historical elements, class backgrounds, and the relationship with other ethnic minorities. The second part of the book challenges the most common stereotypes of Italian Americanness: food (BigNight) and Mafia, deconstructing the criminal tropes that have contributed to shaping the perception of Italian-American mafiosi in The Funeral, Goodfellas, Donnie Brasco, and the first two chapters of the Godfather trilogy. At the crossroads of the fields of Italian Culture, Italian American Culture, Film Studies, and Migration Studies, Italian Americans in Film is written not only for undergraduate and graduate students but also for scholars who teach courses on Italian American Cinema and Visual Culture.

About the authors:
Daniele Fioretti teaches Italian American culture and Italian cinema, language, and culture at Miami University, USA. He is the author of Utopia and Dystopia in Postwar Italian Literature – Pasolini, Calvino, Sanguineti, Volponi (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He has also written Carte di fabbrica: la narrativa industriale in Italia 1934-1989 (2013) as well as articles and book chapters on cinema and literature.Fulvio Orsitto is the Director of the Georgetown University study center in Fiesole, Italy. He has published more than thirty essays and book chapters on Italian and Italian American cinema and Italian Literature. His book publications include the edited volumes The Other and the Elsewhere in Italian Culture (2011) and Cinema and Risorgimento (2012), the co-authored manual Film and Education. Capturing Bilingual Communities (2014), and seven other co-edited volumes.

Press Reviews:
"Indeed, Italian American cinema has in many ways held an outsized space in academic studies of Italian American cultural production. … The student of Italian American cinema will also find helpful the extensive bibliography that concludes each essay, as well as the additional section of films cited, which can help the reader move beyond the works that are the focus of the chapters and widen their familiarity with cinematic texts that have yet to become part of the canon." (Rebecca Bauman, Italian American Review, Vol. 14 (2), 2024)

See the publisher website: Palgrave MacMillan

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