The American Nightmare: Reading and Teaching Pietro di Donato's Ethnographic Novel Christ in Concrete

2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-156
Author(s):  
Rose De Angelis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interdisciplinary Course

In the interdisciplinary course entitled The Italian-American Experience, Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete is examined, explored, and analyzed within historical, socio-political, and literary contexts. The novel becomes a point of focus for the discussion of immigrant life and working-class people in a broader and contextualized understanding of Italian Americans. Students read Christ in Concrete in conjunction with essays documenting the history of workers' struggles in the United States. Read as cultural artifact, Christ in Concrete documents with historical clarity and brutal honesty the way in which the American Dream turned nightmare. Using language, religion, and social politics as focal points, the paper looks at Italian-Americans, their virtues and flaws, their struggles and triumphs, as it underscores the culture's unique contributions to the American mosaic not only in the lived lives of the novel's characters but also in the poetics of its discourse.

scholarly journals Italian Immigrants and Working-Class Movements in the United States: A Personal Reflection on Class and Ethnicity

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 293-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolph J. Vecoli
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Important Work ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
Italian Immigrants ◽  
American Radicalism

Abstract The article argues that the locus of the most interesting and important work in the fields of immigration and labor history lies precisely at the intersection of class and ethnicity. In developing this thesis, particularly with respect to Italian immigrant working-class movements in the United States, the author draws on his experiences as a working-class ethnic and historian as well as his readings of the literature. In the course of his research on Italian immigrants in Chicago, the author stumbled upon the submerged, indeed suppressed, history of the Italian American left. Italian-American working-class history has since been the focus of his work. Since mainstream institutions had neglected the records of this history, the recovery of rich documentation on Italian American radicalism has been a source of particular satisfaction. These movements had also been "forgotten" by the Italian Americans themselves. Despite important work by a handful of American scholars, relatively few Italian American historians have given attention to this dimension of the Italian American experience. Curiously the topic has received more attention from scholars in Italy. Mass emigration as much as revolutionary movements was an expression of the social upheavals of turn-of-the-century Italy. As participants in those events, the immigrants brought more or less inchoate ideas of class and ethnicity to America with them. Here they developed class and ethnic identities as Italian-American workers. The construction of those identities has been a process in which the Italian immigrants have been protagonists, filtering cultural messages through the sieve of their own experiences, memories, and values. Historians of labor and immigration need to plumb the sources of class and ethnic identity more imaginatively and sensitively, recognizing that personal identity is a whole of which class and ethnicity are inseparable aspects. The author calls upon historians to salvage and restore the concepts of class and ethnicity as useful categories of analysis.

On Fat Clothes: Unraveling Plus-Size Design Discourse

Design Issues ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Lauren Downing Peters
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Fashion Theory ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article considers the possibilities and limitations of plus-size clothing— a subcategory of ready-to-wear that is deeply embedded in the history of dieting, exercise, standardized sizing, and the industrialization of clothing manufacturing in the United States. In doing so, it draws on fashion theory and disability theory in exposing how plus-size clothing functions as a normalizing mechanism, thereby inhibiting innovation in this sector. The article concludes with a counterexploration of the possibilities of “fat clothes” and the novel w ays of seeing and existing in the world that they might enable.

Italian American Identity and Politics: World War II To the Cold War

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-48
Author(s):  
Danielle Battisti
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Identity ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines Italian American loyalty campaigns during World War II as well as postwar campaigns to promote the democratic reconstruction of Italy. It argues that even though Italian Americans had made great strides toward political and social inclusion in the United States, they were still deeply concerned with their group’s public identity at mid-century. This chapter also demonstrates that in the course of their increased involvement with their homeland politics in the postwar period, Italian Americans gradually came to believe that the successful democratization of Italy (and therefore their own standing in the United States) was dependent upon relieving population pressures that they believed threatened the political and economic reconstruction of Italy. That belief played an important role in stirring Italian Americans to action on issues of immigration reform.

Teaching Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and the Diamond Sutra

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-172
Author(s):  
Darin Pradittatsanee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Buddhist Text ◽  
History Of

The essay discusses Jack Kerouac’s use of the Diamond Sutra, a major Buddhist text grounding his composition of The Dharma Bums. In addition to a close reading of how the sutra is incorporated in the novel, the essay also presents a brief history of Buddhism in the United States.

From Book to Film

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Christine M. E. Guth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Film History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Literary Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Mary McNeil Fenollosa’s 1906 novel The Dragon Painter and its 1919 filmic adaptation sit at the intersection of American literary, art, and film history. Simultaneously personal and political, each is a product of its time and place. Together, they tell a story about changing (and unchanging) attitudes that were constituents of the complex and often contradictory history of the reception of Japanese culture and people in the United States. The novel draws on stereotypes of Japan as a primitive country of innately artistic people that at the time of its publication had been made familiar through art and literature. The silent film, produced in Hollywood, by and co-starring Sessue Hayakawa and his wife Tsuru Aoki, expanded and complicated the modes of visualizing Japan by featuring a Japanese couple in starring roles. This article addresses the relationship between the novel, an allegory of Japanese cultural loss and renewal, and the film, a romance inflected with American concerns about race, drawing particular attention to gender and Japanism in their reception and interpretation.

The Intimacies of Complicity

2020 ◽  
pp. 241-262
Author(s):  
Daniel Y. Kim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Japanese Colonialism ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Korean Christianity ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
History Of

This chapter elaborates a transnational literary critical methodology for approaching South Korean depictions of the Korean War that now circulate in the United States in translated form through an analysis of Hwang Sok-yong’s novel The Guest. This magical realist work recounts a massacre that occurred in late 1950 in which roughly thirty-five thousand residents of Sinch’on, located in what is now North Korea, were slaughtered by their friends and neighbors. This chapter situates The Guest in its domestic context, elaborating its critique of both North and South Korean nationalist narratives that tend to avoid holding Koreans themselves accountable for such atrocities, and its complex engagement with the history of Korean Christianity. Even as it does so, however, the novel also implicates Japanese colonialism and Western Christianity in the violence that erupted in Sinch’on. However, this chapter also argues that this novel in its translated form must also be read within the context of its circulation in the United States, which highlights certain aspects of it: the affinities it suggests between working-class Koreans drawn to Marxism and enslaved Africans and its critique of the bystander role adopted by the US military in relation to atrocities committed by its Korean allies.

New Italian Migrations to the United States

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Food Culture ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Italian Studies ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian Immigration ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Critical Conversation

This second volume of New Italian Migrations to the United States continues the critical conversation with its predecessor by exploring Italian immigration to the United States from 1945 to the present, focusing on cultural expressivity, artistic productions, community engagement, and media representations. The book challenges our understanding of art and culture created by and about Italian Americans in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries by considering ongoing Italian migratory flows. Each new group of Italian migrants and their descendants creates fresh models of Italian American culture, impacts preexisting ones, and continually reboot Italian America. The essays herein focus on such topics as transnational intimacy aided by an Italian-language radio program that broadcast messages from family members in Italy, the exoticized actors like Sophia Loren and Pier Angeli who helped shape a glamorous Italian style out of images of desperate postwar poverty, the constellation of cement figures crafted by a self-taught artist outside of Detroit, a folk-revival performer who infuses tarantella with New Age and feminist tonalities, the role of immigrant cookbook writers like Marcella Hazan and Lidia Bastianich in crafting a fashionable Italian food culture, and a review of current literature on the Italian “brain drain” and its impact on university Italian Studies. The afterword discusses the nomenclature ascribed to Italian American creative writers living in Italy and the United States.

scholarly journals Teju Cole's Nigeria and the open cities of New York and Brussels

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Igor Maver
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
The City

The novel Open City (2011) by the Nigerian-born and raised author Teju Cole isset in New York City, where he has lived since 1992. The narrator and protagonist of the book, the young Nigerian doctor Julius in is a veritable flâneur in the Big Apple, who is observing the rapidly changing multiethnic character of the city and meditating on (his) history and culture, identity and solitude, and the world beyond the United States, with which it is interconnected through the global history of violence and pain. He is juxtaposing the past and the present, the seemingly borderless open city of New York, Nigeria, and the various European locales, particularly Brussels.Thenovel, although set in the United States, is constantly interspersed with his recollections of his past experiences conditioned by hiscomplex hybrid Nigerian-European-American identity.

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