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Laura E. Ruberto is a professor of humanities in the Arts and Cultural Studies Department at Berkeley City College. She is the author of Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women's Work in Italy and the U.S. Joseph Sciorra is Director for Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY. He is author of Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City. They are coeditors of New Italian Migrations to the United States, Volume 1: Politics and History since 1945.
Summary
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.
