Italian Americans in Film: Establishing and Challenging Italian American Identities

ISBN-13: 9783031064647 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022

Fioretti, Daniele

Spis treści

1.     Chapter 1/Introduction

Daniele Fioretti and Fulvio Orsitto

PART I -

ESTABLISHING ITALIAN AMERICAN IDENTITIES

2.     Chapter 2

‘I Don’t Do Business with Dagoes’: Anti-Italian Discrimination in Nicholas Meyer’s Vendetta

Daniele Fioretti 

3.     Chapter 3

Ask the ‘Dust Jacket’. Robert Towne’s Film Adaptation of John Fante’s Ask the Dust

Claudia Peralta and Fulvio Orsitto

4.     Chapter 4

Setting the Italian American Gangster in Stone: Little Caesar and Scarface 

Philip Balma

5.     Chapter 5

Nice Guys Finish Last? Delbert Mann’s Marty 

Gloria Pastorino

6.     Chapter 6

The Italian American Prizefighter: Ethnicity in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull

Irene Lottini

7.     Chapter 7

Mean Streets. A Mirror Construction of Reality

Fulvio Orsitto

PART II -

CHALLENGING ITALIAN AMERICAN IDENTITIES (and Their Representations)

8.     Chapter 8

The Funeral: Taking Aim at the Stereotype

Luca Barattoni

9.     Chapter 9

Good Food is Close to God: Religious Overtones of the Culinary Arts in Big Night

Felice Beneduce

10.  Chapter 10

The Eclipse of the Godfather’s Garden: From the Agromafia to the Money Mafia

Elena Past

11.  Chapter 11

Goodfellas. When the ‘Kid from Little Italy’ Meets the ‘Oklahoma Kid’

Fulvio Orsitto

12.  Chapter 12

Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco between Classic Hollywood and the New Gangster

Sabrina Ovan

13.  Chapter 13

Documentary and Italian American Identity: Time and Exposure in Alfred Guzzetti’s Family Films

Andy Rice

O autorze

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.   

Blurb

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 (Big Night) 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.

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.