Italian American Women, Food, and Identity

Italian American Women, Food, and Identity PDF Author: Andrea L. Dottolo
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319747576
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This book is about Italian American women, food, identity, and our stories at the table. This mother-daughter research team explores how Italian American working-class women from Syracuse, New York use food as a symbol and vehicle which carries multiple meanings. In these narratives, food represents home, loss, and longing. Food also stands in for race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration, region, place, and space. The authors highlight how food is about family and tradition, as well as choice and change. These women's narratives reveal that food is related to celebration, love, power, and shame. As this study centers on the intergenerational transmission of culture, the authors' relationship mirrors these questions as they contend with their similar and disparate experiences and relationships with Italian American identity and food. The authors use the "recipe" as a conversational bridge to elicit narratives about identity and the self. They also encourage readers to listen closely to the stories at their own tables to consider how recipes and food are a way for us to claim who we are, who we think we are, who we want to be, and who we are not.

Italian American Women, Food, and Identity

Italian American Women, Food, and Identity PDF Author: Andrea L. Dottolo
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319747576
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is about Italian American women, food, identity, and our stories at the table. This mother-daughter research team explores how Italian American working-class women from Syracuse, New York use food as a symbol and vehicle which carries multiple meanings. In these narratives, food represents home, loss, and longing. Food also stands in for race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration, region, place, and space. The authors highlight how food is about family and tradition, as well as choice and change. These women's narratives reveal that food is related to celebration, love, power, and shame. As this study centers on the intergenerational transmission of culture, the authors' relationship mirrors these questions as they contend with their similar and disparate experiences and relationships with Italian American identity and food. The authors use the "recipe" as a conversational bridge to elicit narratives about identity and the self. They also encourage readers to listen closely to the stories at their own tables to consider how recipes and food are a way for us to claim who we are, who we think we are, who we want to be, and who we are not.

When I Am Italian

When I Am Italian PDF Author: Joanna Clapps Herman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438477198
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
"My ancestral Italian village in America was in Waterbury Connecticut." In this sentence, Joanna Clapps Herman raises the central question of this book: To what extent can a person born outside of Italy be considered Italian? The granddaughter of Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States in the early 1900s, Herman takes a complicated and nuanced look at the question of to whom and to which culture she ultimately belongs. Sometimes the Italian part of her identity—her Italianità—feels so aboriginal as to be inchoate, inexpressible. Sometimes it finds its expression in the rhythms of daily life. Sometimes it is embraced and enhanced; at others, it feels attenuated. "If, like me," Herman writes, "you are from one of Italy's overseas colonies, at least some of this Italianità will be in your skin, bones, and heart: other pieces have to be understood, considered, called to ourselves through study, travel, reading. Some of it is just longing. How do we know which pieces are which?"

Italian American

Italian American PDF Author: David A.J. Richards
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814763804
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 571

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Book Description
When southern Italians began emigrating to the U.S. in large numbers in the 1870s-part of the "new immigration" from southern and eastern rather than northern Europe-they were seen as racially inferior, what David A. J. Richards terms "nonvisibly" black. The first study of its kind, Italian American explores the acculturation process of Italian immigrants in terms of then-current patterns of European and American racism. Delving into the political and legal context of flawed liberal nationalism both in Italy (the Risorgimento) and the United States (Reconstruction Amendments), Richards examines why Italian Americans were so reluctant to influence depictions of themselves and their own collective identity. He argues that American racism could not have had the durability or political power it has had either in the popular understanding or in the corruption of constitutional ideals unless many new immigrants, themselves often regarded as racially inferior, had been drawn into accepting and supporting many of the terms of American racism. With its unprecedented focus on Italian American identity and an interdisciplinary approach to comparative culture and law, this timely study sheds important light on the history and contemporary importance of identity and multicultural politics in American political and constitutional debate.

The Italian American Table

The Italian American Table PDF Author: Simone Cinotto
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095014
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Best Food Book of 2014 by The Atlantic Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, Simone Cinotto recreates the bustling world of Italian life in New York City and demonstrates how food was at the center of the lives of immigrants and their children. From generational conflicts resolved around the family table to a vibrant food-based economy of ethnic producers, importers, and restaurateurs, food was essential to the creation of an Italian American identity. Italian American foods offered not only sustenance but also powerful narratives of community and difference, tradition and innovation as immigrants made their way through a city divided by class conflict, ethnic hostility, and racialized inequalities. Drawing on a vast array of resources including fascinating, rarely explored primary documents and fresh approaches in the study of consumer culture, Cinotto argues that Italian immigrants created a distinctive culture of food as a symbolic response to the needs of immigrant life, from the struggle for personal and group identity to the pursuit of social and economic power. Adding a transnational dimension to the study of Italian American foodways, Cinotto recasts Italian American food culture as an American "invention" resonant with traces of tradition.

Were You Always an Italian?

Were You Always an Italian? PDF Author: Maria Laurino
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393049305
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Journalist and writer Maria Laurino blends autobiography and cultural history in this revealing look at Italian culture and its impact on Italian-American, and American, life. Particularly valuable is her discussion of stereotyping (both nostalgic and negative) and her insightful description of her struggle, beginning in adolescence, with her own Italian identity. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Migrant Marketplaces

Migrant Marketplaces PDF Author: Elizabeth Zanoni
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050320
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
Italian immigrants to the United States and Argentina hungered for the products of home. Merchants imported Italian cheese, wine, olive oil, and other commodities to meet the demand. The two sides met in migrant marketplaces—urban spaces that linked a mobile people with mobile goods in both real and imagined ways. Elizabeth Zanoni provides a cutting-edge comparative look at Italian people and products on the move between 1880 and 1940. Concentrating on foodstuffs—a trade dominated by Italian entrepreneurs in New York and Buenos Aires—Zanoni reveals how consumption of these increasingly global imports affected consumer habits and identities and sparked changing and competing connections between gender, nationality, and ethnicity. Women in particular—by tradition tasked with buying and preparing food—had complex interactions that influenced both global trade and their community economies. Zanoni conveys the complicated and often fraught values and meanings that surrounded food, meals, and shopping. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Migrant Marketplaces offers a new perspective on the linkages between migration and trade that helped define globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Representations of Female Identity in Italy

Representations of Female Identity in Italy PDF Author: Silvia Giovanardi Byer
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443892726
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This volume explores a variety of iconic female characters in Italian literature, art and film who depict distinct representatives of female identity within this national culture. The contributors here apply various methodologies to characterize the evolution of women’s identity and their representation in such expressive modalities, drawing from literature, film, drama, history, the humanities, media and cultural studies. Cross-genre, cross-cultural, and cross-national explorations are also utilised here in order to underline the multifaceted ways in which de facto female characterization occurred.

Festa

Festa PDF Author: Helen Barolini
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299179847
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Born of Italian-American parents, Helen Barolini rediscovered her culinary heritage when she married Italian writer Antonio Barolini and lived for some years in Italy. Festa is a year-long feast of memories and delicious, traditional Italian dishes--from St. Nicholas sweetmeats in December and perciatelli with sardines and fennel for March's St. Joseph's Day, to figs with prosciutto for summer's Ferragosto and pumpkin gnocchi for an American Thanksgiving in Italy.

American Woman, Italian Style

American Woman, Italian Style PDF Author: Carol Bonomo Albright
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823231755
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
With writings that span more than thirty-five years, American Woman, Italian Style is a rich collection of essays that fleshes out the realities of today's Italian American women and explores the myriad ways they continue to add to the American experience. The status of modern Italian-American women in the United States is noteworthy: their quiet and continued growth into respected positions in the professional worlds of law and medicine surpasses the success achieved in that of the general population--so too does their educational attainment and income. Contributions include Donna Gabaccia on the oral-to-written history of cookbooks, Carol Helstosky on the Tradition of Invention, an interview with Sandra Gilbert, Paul Levitt's look at Lucy Mancini as a metaphor for the modern world, William Egelman's survey of women's work patterns, and Edvige Giunta on the importance of a selfconscious understanding of memory. There are explorations of Jewish-Italian intermarriages and interpretations of entrepreneurship in Milwaukee. Readers will find challenges to common assumptions and stereotypes, departures from normal samplings, and springboards to further research. American Woman, Italian Style: Italian Americana's Best Writings on Women offers unique insights into issues of gender and ethnicity and is a voice for the less heard and less seen side of the Italian-American experience from immigrant times to the present. Instead of seeking consensus or ideological orthodoxy, this collection brings together writers with a wide range of backgrounds, outlooks, ideas, and experiences. It is an impressive postmodern collection for interdisciplinary studies: a book and a look about being and becoming an American.

Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America

Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America PDF Author: Mayukh Sen
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324004525
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
A New York Times Editors' Choice pick Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, Food Network, KCRW, WBUR Here & Now, Emma Straub, and Globe and Mail One of the Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2021 America’s modern culinary history told through the lives of seven pathbreaking chefs and food writers. Who’s really behind America’s appetite for foods from around the globe? This group biography from an electric new voice in food writing honors seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. Taste Makers stretches from World War II to the present, with absorbing and deeply researched portraits of figures including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine; and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes. In imaginative, lively prose, Mayukh Sen—a queer, brown child of immigrants—reconstructs the lives of these women in vivid and empathetic detail, daring to ask why some were famous in their own time, but not in ours, and why others shine brightly even today. Weaving together histories of food, immigration, and gender, Taste Makers will challenge the way readers look at what’s on their plate—and the women whose labor, overlooked for so long, makes those meals possible.