From Paesani to White Ethnics

From Paesani to White Ethnics
Author: Stefano Luconi
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2001-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0791491234

From Paesani to White Ethnics analyzes the process by which people of Italian descent renegotiated their sense of community and ethnic self-perception in Philadelphia from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. At the turn of the century, Italian immigrants who arrived in Philadelphia originally formed allegiances and social clusters based on their localistic, provincial, or regional ties. By the late 1930s, however, the emergence of Italian nationalism together with the end of mass immigration from Italy and the appearance of an American-born second generation of individuals with loose ties to the land of their parents contributed to bring together Italian Americans from disparate local backgrounds and helped them to develop a common national identity that they had lacked upon arrival in the United States. Luconi explains how Italian Americans continued to distance themselves from other European minorities throughout the early postwar years until ethnic defensiveness against the alleged encroachments of African Americans as well as racial tensions over housing forced them to extend the boundaries of their ethnic identity in the 1960s and to redefine it within the broader context of the white ethnic movement. This process climaxed as Philadelphia polarized along racial lines on issues such as public education and crime in the late 1960s and a

Are Italians White?

Are Italians White?
Author: Jennifer Guglielmo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2012-11-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136062424

This dazzling collection of original essays from some of the country's leading thinkers asks the rather intriguing question - Are Italians White? Each piece carefully explores how, when and why whiteness became important to Italian Americans, and the significance of gender, class and nation to racial identity.

Leaving Little Italy

Leaving Little Italy
Author: Fred L. Gardaphé
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0791485978

Leaving Little Italy explores the various forces that have shaped and continue to mold Italian American culture. Early chapters offer a historical survey of major developments in Italian American culture, from the early mass immigration period to the present day, situating these developments within the larger framework of American culture as a whole. Subsequent chapters examine particular works of Italian American literature and film from a variety of perspectives, including literary history, gender, social class, autobiography, and race. Paying particular attention to how the individual artist's personality has intersected with community in the shaping of Italian American culture, the book reveals how and why Italian America was invented and why Little Italys must ultimately disappear.

Redirecting Ethnic Singularity

Redirecting Ethnic Singularity
Author: Yiorgos Anagnostou
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2022-05-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0823299740

Promotes the understanding of Italian Americans and Greek Americans through the study of their interactions and juxtapositions. Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation contributes to U.S. ethnic and immigration studies by bringing into conversation scholars working in the fields of Italian American and Greek American studies in the United States, Europe, and Australia. The work moves beyond the “single group” approach—an approach that privileges the study of ethnic singularity––to explore instead two ethnic groups in relation to each other in the broader context of the United States. The chapters bring into focus transcultural interfaces and inquire comparatively about similarities and differences in cultural representations associated with these two groups. This co-edited volume contributes to the fields of transcultural and comparative studies. The book is multi-disciplinary. It features scholarship from the perspectives of architecture, ethnomusicology, education, history, cultural and literary studies, and film studies, as well as whiteness studies. It examines the production of ethnicity in the context of American political culture as well as that of popular culture, including visual representations (documentary, film, TV series) and “low brow” crime fiction. It includes analysis of literature. It involves comparative work on religious architecture, transoceanic circulation of racialized categories, translocal interconnections in the formation of pan-Mediterranean identities, and the making of the immigrant past in documentaries from Italian and Greek filmmakers. This volume is the first of its kind in initiating a multidisciplinary transcultural and comparative study across European Americans.

A Companion to American Immigration

A Companion to American Immigration
Author: Reed Ueda
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 931
Release: 2011-03-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1444391658

A Companion to American Immigration is an authoritative collection of original essays by leading scholars on the major topics and themes underlying American immigration history. Focuses on the two most important periods in American Immigration history: the Industrial Revolution (1820-1930) and the Globalizing Era (Cold War to the present) Provides an in-depth treatment of central themes, including economic circumstances, acculturation, social mobility, and assimilation Includes an introductory essay by the volume editor.

Blue-Collar Conservatism

Blue-Collar Conservatism
Author: Timothy J. Lombardo
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2018-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812295439

The postwar United States has experienced many forms of populist politics, none more consequential than that of the blue-collar white ethnics who brought figures like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump to the White House. Blue-Collar Conservatism traces the rise of this little-understood, easily caricatured variant of populism by presenting a nuanced portrait of the supporters of Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo. In 1971, Frank Rizzo became the first former police commissioner elected mayor of a major American city. Despite serving as a Democrat, Rizzo cultivated his base of support by calling for "law and order" and opposing programs like public housing, school busing, affirmative action, and other policies his supporters deemed unearned advantages for nonwhites. Out of this engagement with the interwoven politics of law enforcement, school desegregation, equal employment, and urban housing, Timothy J. Lombardo argues, blue-collar populism arose. Based on extensive archival research, and with an emphasis on interrelated changes to urban space and blue-collar culture, Blue-Collar Conservatism challenges the familiar backlash narrative, instead contextualizing blue-collar politics within postwar urban and economic crises. Historian and Philadelphia-native Lombardo demonstrates how blue-collar whites did not immediately abandon welfare liberalism but instead selectively rejected liberal policies based on culturally defined ideas of privilege, disadvantage, identity, and entitlement. While grounding his analysis in the postwar era's familiar racial fissures, Lombardo also emphasizes class identity as an indispensable driver of blue-collar political engagement. Blue-Collar Conservatism ultimately shows how this combination of factors created one of the least understood but most significant political developments in recent American history.

Discourses That Matter

Discourses That Matter
Author: Maria José Canelo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2013-10-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1443853283

How can English and American Studies be instrumental to conceptualizing the deep instability we are presently facing? How can they address the coordinates of this instability, such as war, terrorism, the current economic and financial crisis, and the consequent myriad forms of deprivation and fear? How can they tackle the strategies of de-humanization, invisibility, and the naturalization of inequality and injustice entailed in contemporary discourses? This anthology grew out of an awareness of the need to debate the role of English and American Studies both in the present context and in relation to the so-called demise of the Humanities. Drawing on Judith Butler’s rethinking of materiality as the effect of power, in her study Bodies That Matter (1993), we locate this collection of essays at the crossroads of discourse and power, while we expect the work collected here to highlight the ability of discourses to materialize in, or as, truth, and as such to support or decry particular constituencies. Discourses therefore matter to us as products and vehicles of power relations that can be subject to the analytical and interpretative tools of English and American Studies. Our idea was to challenge especially young scholars to position their research concerning the ability of their fields to be discourses that matter; in the case in point, to be critical practices that make an active intervention in current debates. By focusing on matters such as language as witness to the world, representations of gender, race, and ethnicity, performative discourses, exceptionalism and power, and interculturality, these essays pursue the chance to deepen, enlarge, and question both literary and cultural phenomena, their established critical readings, and the strategies deployed in representations. Finally, English and American Studies in the present collection demonstrate their affiliation to the Humanities by exploring the numerous possibilities offered by their discourses: their ability to foster critical thought, allowing us to think for (and outside) ourselves, their capacity to test, argue, and question, and their profound imaginative potential.

Becoming Old Stock

Becoming Old Stock
Author: Russell A. Kazal
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 069122367X

More Americans trace their ancestry to Germany than to any other country. Arguably, German Americans form America's largest ethnic group. Yet they have a remarkably low profile today, reflecting a dramatic, twentieth-century retreat from German-American identity. In this age of multiculturalism, why have German Americans gone into ethnic eclipse--and where have they ended up? Becoming Old Stock represents the first in-depth exploration of that question. The book describes how German Philadelphians reinvented themselves in the early twentieth century, especially after World War I brought a nationwide anti-German backlash. Using quantitative methods, oral history, and a cultural analysis of written sources, the book explores how, by the 1920s, many middle-class and Lutheran residents had redefined themselves in "old-stock" terms--as "American" in opposition to southeastern European "new immigrants." It also examines working-class and Catholic Germans, who came to share a common identity with other European immigrants, but not with newly arrived black Southerners. Becoming Old Stock sheds light on the way German Americans used race, American nationalism, and mass culture to fashion new identities in place of ethnic ones. It is also an important contribution to the growing literature on racial identity among European Americans. In tracing the fate of one of America's largest ethnic groups, Becoming Old Stock challenges historians to rethink the phenomenon of ethnic assimilation and to explore its complex relationship to American pluralism.

One Quarter of the Nation

One Quarter of the Nation
Author: Nancy Foner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2023-10-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0691255350

An in-depth look at the many ways immigration has redefined modern America The impact of immigrants over the past half century has become so much a part of everyday life in the United States that we sometimes fail to see it. This deeply researched book by one of America’s leading immigration scholars tells the story of how immigrants are fundamentally changing this country. An astonishing number of immigrants and their children—nearly eighty-six million people—now live in the United States. Together, they have transformed the American experience in profound and far-reaching ways that go to the heart of the country’s identity and institutions. Unprecedented in scope, One Quarter of the Nation traces how immigration has reconfigured America’s racial order—and, importantly, how Americans perceive race—and played a pivotal role in reshaping electoral politics and party alignments. It discusses how immigrants have rejuvenated our urban centers as well as some far-flung rural communities, and examines how they have strengthened the economy, fueling the growth of old industries and spurring the formation of new ones. This wide-ranging book demonstrates how immigration has touched virtually every facet of American culture, from the music we dance to and the food we eat to the films we watch and books we read. One Quarter of the Nation opens a new chapter in our understanding of immigration. While many books look at how America changed immigrants, this one examines how they changed America. It reminds us that immigration has long been a part of American society, and shows how immigrants and their families continue to redefine who we are as a nation.