Consuming ‘Italian’: Comics, Cooks and Gangsters in Ethnic Commodity Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We might argue that, from an economic point of view, it has never been a more opportune time to be 'Italian' in Canada and North America more generally.As Globe and Mail arts reporter Michael Posner claimed in an article on stand-up comics, "ethnicity is in, and not just in comedy clubs.... advertisers are ready to exploit the resource and to test primetime North America's appetite for bold ethnic humour."When Mambo Italiano premiered in September 2003 at the Toronto International Film Festival, Matthew Hays claimed that it joined "a spate of recent international movies that have taken autobiographical second-generation immigrant stories and translated them into hugely successful blockbusters.Along with My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Bend it Like Beckham and Bollywood/Hollywood, Mambo Italiano ... joins the ranks of what is rapidly becoming a hugely profitable sub-genre: the New Ethnic Blockbuster."What these observations share and highlight is the need to position Italian examples in the larger context of ethnically-inflected entertainment forms and, in turn, that these forms are big business-locally and globally.In other words, they remind us that representational forms are marketed as commodities, and so too, is ethnicity.Things 'Italian' are particularly popular and desirable.If Italian immigrants were targets of hostility and sources of anxiety in Canadian society in the past, their practices have more recently been embraced, celebrated, even fetishized.Ignoring for a moment Italian-language television broadcasting (eg.Telelatino), one could list countless examples of the opportunities to consume so-called Italian culture-ranging from cooking shows, sitcoms and dramas on television, theatre, comedy in clubs and on radio, movies, magazines, and websites, to specialty shops and museum exhibits-all targeted to the population as a whole.Similar forms and tendencies can be traced across English-speaking countries of the Italian diaspora, most notably Australia and the United The Virtual Piazza.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".