Italian Americans on Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future

Italian Americans on Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future is a thoughtful collection of dense essays that offers readers a look at some of the many approaches to the increasingly visible field of Italian American studies. It is a scholarly book for an academic audience that sets out to update and, in some cases, challenge existing parameters of the field, and in this way, I fully agree with the editors in their positioning of the volume as a clear successor to works by such foundational scholars as Anthony Tamburri, Fred Gardaphé, and Robert Casillo. In fact, the editors begin by presenting Casillo's important work on Italian American director Martin Scorsese as an example of the model that has thus far dominated Italian American studies, a model that tends to be limited by narrow understandings of biography and cultural inheritance so that Italian Americanness must be identifiable both in the artist's name and history as well as in their preferred subject matter. In this volume, Alan Gravano and Ryan Calabretta-Sajder propose expanding this one-to-one correspondence model by engaging with different theories of identity and representation: “Given the broader, competing, and at times, conflicting concepts of migration in culture and media studies—from exile and diaspora, page to screen, and theory to application—this project conjoins prior scholarship and theoretical underpinnings with new sociocultural hermeneutical approaches to newspaper, online media, television and film” (2). Among the contributors to this volume are established scholars like Jonathan Cavallero, Mary Ann McDonald Carolan, and Colleen Ryan, but we are also introduced to compelling work by newer researchers. This attention to multivocality across the hierarchies that so often divide academia is a most welcome move by the volume editors, who are positioning themselves as formidable authorities in the evolving field.The topics covered are varied as well and have been organized into four discrete sections, each focused on either film or television or on the reception and distribution of these. In the first section, “What Is Italian American Culture?” the question of ethnic authenticity and belonging is challenged by revisiting some major Hollywood names in unexpected ways, such as Gravano's look at race, ethnic identity, and disability in Rocky, and Cavallero's discussion of the commodification of food in Big Night (an analysis that could now be interestingly applied to Stanley Tucci's recent project Searching for Italy). In this section, Ryan takes on Sofia Coppola, an actress and director who, despite being heiress to one of the biggest names in Italian American film history, is rarely discussed in terms of her ethnic identity. The section maps out a series of Italian and Italian American cinematic intertexts through which to analyze Coppola's work: discussing sexuality and race in The Virgin Suicides by putting it in dialogue with Saturday Night Fever; Coppola's Somewhere is discussed in relation to the ambivalence and ennui that characterize Fellini, Antonioni, and Pasolini's more iconic works (I would add that the aesthetic and thematic echoes of these can be seen clearly not just in Somewhere but throughout Coppola's films); finally, through her reading of The Beguiled, Ryan suggests that Coppola's films be read as a complete oeuvre that works to both represent and interrogate the enduring loyalty to the patriarchal structure of the family, a structure that for Coppola is inherently based in Italian American culture. Ryan's study of Sofia Coppola, and the fact that hers is one of the only pieces of scholarship to consider Coppola's work in terms of Italian Americanism, points to an attitude of paternalism that so many hold up as emblematic of Italian American culture—an attitude that permeates scholarship as well as popular culture.In section 2, “Blurring the Lines between Italian and American on Screen,” Carolan and Giuseppe Sorrentino (separately) consider the ways Italians (as distinct from Italian Americans) have engaged with the US both in terms of on-screen narrativizing and the practical and artistic aspects of cultural translation. Section 3, “Re-viewing Italian Americana on Screen: Reception and Reflections,” focuses more specifically on American television and the representation stereotypes; here Calabretta-Sajder considers the role of humor in the perpetuation of Italian American stereotypes, drawing on and adding to the premise established by Cavallero (2004) in his now germinal article “Gangesters, Fessos, Tricksters, and Sopranos: The Historical Roots of Italian American Stereotype Anxiety.” In the same section, Francesco Chianese discusses the dramatic in his study of The Sopranos and the different kinds of stereotypes at play in American representations of both Italian and Italian American mobsters.The title of the volume suggests a narrow focus on audio-visual representation (“the screen”) and on the United States (“Italian American”), but in truth, the book exceeds these categories, and nowhere is this more evident than in the last section, “Italian Newspapers, Italian Cinema, and 2.0 Media,” with Giacomo Sproccati's chapter on a sort of epistolary back-and-forth between Buzzfeed and La Stampa, and Jessica Whitehead and Paul Moore's study of the role of movie theaters in the Italian Canadian community. In the first instance, Sproccati explains the way two text-based publications, one Italian and one American, with online platforms engage with the question of national representation abroad. While it is certainly worth considering the ways reading a screen is distinct from reading on paper, the subtlety of these differences is not engaged with here, leaving us to wonder where the book's organizing category of “screen” comes into play. In the second example, Moore deals more specifically with Italian emigrants and the movies, and here I am left mulling over the specificity of the term American; we must assume that the book's use of both “Italian American” and “Italian Canadian” is intentional, marking them as related but distinct terms (in keeping with the conventional use of the “American” in “Italian American” to refer to the United States), but the absence of critical reflection from the authors and editors regarding these small but meaningful distinctions leaves us wanting. This is perhaps a reflection of my own anxiety around terminology, but it is also symptomatic of a problem inherent to Italian American studies, a field that bases itself in ethnic specificity while also being tasked with challenging notions of cultural homogeneity, particularly in light of recent renewed calls for ethnic protectionism by conservative Italian American organizations. With that in mind, I am grateful for the mandate to “re-theorize” that Gravano and Calabretta-Sajder encourage with this book.

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