Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America

Don't be put off by the chokingly academic introduction with its 'hieratic significiation of discourse' or its 'foregrounding of transformational artifacts'. These are Ferraro's mandatory genuflections to his colleagues at Duke and The Modern Language Association. The heart of this book is a series of ten essays about the lives of Italian Americans. Ferraro's core idea is that structures and customs that came from Italy were transformed in America into a set of values and attitudes that we have come to call 'Italian'. It's worth remembering that the construction of Italian identity in Italy has happened in a similar way and during almost the same period of time. Particularly evocative are the stories of Maria Barbella, the seamstress who killed her seducer with a straight razor and a certain Italo-American entertainer who goes by the name 'Madonna'. The former is a story that's ready to become an opera, rich in layers and ironies. The latter, apparently already is an opera. Ferraro also grapples with the curious question of Italian-Americans' apparent fondness for the more overblown stereotypical depictions of their culture. In the chapter on the movie Moonstruck, Ferraro points out that indignation about the stereotypes seems reserved for 'intellectiuals and Ishmael Reed'. Reed of course, is African-American and therefore supposedly not in on the joke. Ferraro's writing is graceful (I almost said 'gracile') but he slips often into the argot of the academy-one scene in Moonstruck is 'female focalized', the Jersey shore in The Big Night is 'the habitus of the Italian American imaginary'. No matter, the man is a poet and a visionary and he squeezes some modicum of elegance even from this deliberately ugly language. Most importantly, Feeling Italian-which won the American Book Award-is a thoughtful look at a part of our landscape that we usually view in a unconscious, but pleasant haze. Lynn Hoffman, author ofbang BANG: A Novel

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