New Italian Migrations to the United States: Vol. 2: Art and Culture since 1945 - Tapa dura

"Laura E. Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra have constellated exacting, often revelatory treatments of the 'rebooting of Italian America' from 1945 to present: radio-conducted familial intimacies, an iconography of luscious Italian female beauty, the U.S. conquests of Italian cuisine, the brain drain of Italian elites into the American academy, and more. Volume two of New Italian Migrations to the United States is of timely value not only to Italian Americanists but to all scholars of late-century cultural flows, which turn out to be globally incorporative and transformatively procreative not despite but because they are ethnic specific and mass-mediated."--Thomas J. Ferraro, author of Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America

This 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.