Exploring Italian American consumers and the U.S. consumption of Italianness, Making Italian America makes a compelling case for taste as a leading determinant of ethnic identity. Discussing in fresh ways topics as diverse as immigrant women’s fashion, critiques of consumerism in Italian immigrant radicalism, the Cold-War politics of consumption across the Atlantic, the Italian American influence in early rock ‘n’ roll, ethnic tourism in Little Italy, Guido subculture, film, sports, and bodybuilding, Making Italian America recasts Italian immigrants and their children as active consumers who, ... More

Exploring Italian American consumers and the U.S. consumption of Italianness, Making Italian America makes a compelling case for taste as a leading determinant of ethnic identity. Discussing in fresh ways topics as diverse as immigrant women’s fashion, critiques of consumerism in Italian immigrant radicalism, the Cold-War politics of consumption across the Atlantic, the Italian American influence in early rock ‘n’ roll, ethnic tourism in Little Italy, Guido subculture, film, sports, and bodybuilding, Making Italian America recasts Italian immigrants and their children as active consumers who, since the turn of the twentieth century, have creatively managed to articulate relations of race, gender, and class and create distinctive lifestyles out of materials the marketplace offered to them. Grounded in the new scholarship in transnational U.S. history and the transfer of cultural patterns, fourteen essays explore Italian American history in the light of consumer culture, across more than a century-long intense movement of people, goods, money, ideas, and images between Italy and the United States—a diasporic exchange that has transformed both nations. In the introduction, Simone Cinotto builds an imaginative analytical framework for understanding the ways in which ethnic and racial groups have shaped their collective identities and negotiated their place in the consumers’ emporium and marketplace. Making Italian America appraises how immigrants and their children forged their identities, material cultures and lifestyles, redesigned the market to suit their tastes, and in the process made Italian American identities—incorporated in commodities, commercial leisure, and popular representations—the object of desire for millions of American and global consumers.