New Italian Migrations to the United States

with Editors Laura Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra

New Italian Migrations to the United States
Volume 1: Politics and History since 1945
Volume 2: Art and Culture since 1945

Edited by Laura Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra

Vol. 1 Contributors: Ottorino Cappelli, Donna Gabaccia, Stefano Luconi, Maddalena Marinari, James S. Pasto, Rodrigo Praino, Laura E. Ruberto, Joseph Sciorra, Donald Tricarico, and Elizabeth Zanoni.

Vol. 2 Contributors: John Allan Cicala, Simone Cinotto, Teresa Fiore, Incoronata (Nadia) Inserra, Laura E. Ruberto, Joseph Sciorra, and Anthony Julian Tamburri.

A conversation with the editors Laura Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra.

Italian immigration from 1945 to the present is an American phenomenon too little explored in our historical studies. Until now. In this new collection, Laura E. Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra edit essays by an elite roster of scholars in Italian American studies. These interdisciplinary works focus on leading edge topics that range from politics of the McCarren-Walter Act and its effects on women to the ways Italian Americans mobilized against immigration restrictions. Other essays unwrap the inner workings of multi-ethnic power brokers in a Queens community, portray the complex transformation of identity in Boston’s North End, and trace the development of Italian American youth culture and how new arrivals fit into it. Finally, Donna Gabaccia pens an afterword on the importance of this seventy-year period in U.S. migration history.

The second volume of New Italian Migrations to the United States explores the evolution of art and cultural expressions created by and about Italian immigrants and their descendants since 1945. The essays range from an Italian-language radio program that broadcast intimate messages from family members in Italy to the role of immigrant cookbook writers in crafting a fashionable Italian food culture. Other works look at how exoticized actresses like Sophia Loren and Pier Angeli helped shape a glamorous Italian style out of images of desperate postwar poverty; overlooked forms of brain drain; the connections between countries old and new in the works of Michigan self-taught artist Silvio Barile; and folk revival performer Alessandra Belloni’s reinterpretation of tarantella dance and music for Italian American women. In the afterword, Anthony Julian Tamburri discusses the nomenclature ascribed to Italian American creative writers living in Italy and the United States.

In ENGLISH.

From the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo.