Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans

Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans PDF

Author: Luisa Del Giudice

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2009-11-09

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0230101399

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This book introduces readers to a wide range of interpretations that take oral history and folklore as the premise with a focus on Italian and Italian American culture in disciplines such as history, ethnography, memoir, art, and music.

Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans

Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans PDF

Author: Luisa Del Giudice

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0230620035

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This book introduces readers to a wide range of interpretations that take oral history and folklore as the premise with a focus on Italian and Italian American culture in disciplines such as history, ethnography, memoir, art, and music.

Oral Tradition as History

Oral Tradition as History PDF

Author: Jan M. Vansina

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 1985-09-06

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0299102130

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Jan Vansina’s 1961 book, Oral Tradition, was hailed internationally as a pioneering work in the field of ethno-history. Originally published in French, it was translated into English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and Hungarian. Reviewers were unanimous in their praise of Vansina’s success in subjecting oral traditions to intense functional analysis. Now, Vansina—with the benefit of two decades of additional thought and research—has revised his original work substantially, completely rewriting some sections and adding much new material. The result is an essentially new work, indispensable to all students and scholars of history, anthropology, folklore, and ethno-history who are concerned with the transmission and potential uses of oral material. “Those embarking on the challenging adventure of historical fieldwork with an oral community will find the book a valuable companion, filled with good practical advice. Those who already have collected bodies of oral material, or who strive to interpret and analyze that collected by others, will be forced to subject their own methodological approaches to a critical reexamination in the light of Vansina’s thoughtful and provocative insights. . . . For the second time in a quarter of a century, we are profoundly in the debt of Jan Vansina.”—Research in African Literatures “Oral Traditions as History is an essential addition to the basic literature of African history.”—American Historical Review

Italian American Experience in New Haven, The

Italian American Experience in New Haven, The PDF

Author: Anthony V. Riccio

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2009-01-08

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 0791481700

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Using interviews and photographs, Anthony Riccio provides a vital supplement to our understanding of the Italian immigrant experience in the United States. In conversations around kitchen tables and in social clubs, members of New Haven's Italian American community evoke the rhythms of the streets and the pulse of life in the old ethnic neighborhoods. They describe the events that shaped the twentieth century—the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Great Depression, and World War II—along with the private histories of immigrant women who toiled under terrible working conditions in New Haven's shirt factories, who sacrificed dreams of education and careers for the economic well-being of their families. This is a compelling social, cultural, and political history of a vibrant immigrant community.

Remembering Italian America

Remembering Italian America PDF

Author: Laurie Buonanno

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-11

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1000349365

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Remembering Italian America: Memory, Migration, Identity examines the life of Italians in the United States and the role of migration and collective memory in the history of the construction of Italian American identity. Employing the concept of communicative memory, the authors explain the processes that gave shape to Italian identity in America and the ways in which a symbolic identity became concretized in Italian American oral histories. The text explores the Italy migrants left behind, transatlantic networks, the welcome received by the Italian newcomers, the socioeconomic fabric of Italian America, and the singular worldview that grew out of the immigrant experience. In exploring the role of memory in the construction of Italian American identity, the book analyzes the commonalities in the lives of immigrants, allowing the Italian American experience to speak to the circumstances of newer immigrant communities and allowing these new immigrant communities to speak to the Italian migrant history. Looking at Italian American culture from a multidisciplinary perspective, this volume brings various theoretical perspectives to bear on "what, why, and how" questions concerning the Italian American experience. This book will be of interest to students of ethnic studies, immigration studies, and American/transnational studies, as well as American history. Winner of the 2022 Italian American Studies Association Book Award

The Italian Americans

The Italian Americans PDF

Author: Francis N. Elmi

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-06-22

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 0761871993

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The Italian Americans: A Multicultural View exemplifies a meaningful attempt to inform readers about the Italian Americans’ various experiences in the United States. Unlike many works on the Italian American experience, this unique text explains why popular negative notions of Italian American life are inaccurate. Moreover, this book provides useful information to help the reader become more cognizant of not only the Italian American experience, but the ethnic American experience in general. The eleven chapters of this book are an important beginning for the reader to become informed of the Italian American sociohistorical experiences, including the oppression, exploitation, and discrimination in the United States, past and present.

Italian Signs, American Streets

Italian Signs, American Streets PDF

Author: Fred L. Gardaphé

Publisher: New Americanists

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13:

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In the first major critical reading of Italian American narrative literature in two decades, Fred L. Gardaphé presents an interpretive overview of Italian American literary history. Examining works from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, he develops a new perspective--variously historical, philosophical, and cultural--by which American writers of Italian descent can be read, increasing the discursive power of an ethnic literature that has received too little serious critical attention. Gardaphé draws on Vico's concept of history, as well as the work of Gramsci, to establish a culture-specific approach to reading Italian American literature. He begins his historical reading with narratives informed by oral traditions, primarily autobiography and autobiographical fiction written by immigrants. From these earliest social-realist narratives, Gardaphé traces the evolution of this literature through tales of "the godfather" and the mafia; the "reinvention of ethnicity" in works by Helen Barolini, Tina DeRosa, and Carole Maso; the move beyond ethnicity in fiction by Don DeLillo and Gilbert Sorrentino; to the short fiction of Mary Caponegro, which points to a new direction in Italian American writing. The result is both an ethnography of Italian American narrative and a model for reading the signs that mark the "self-fashioning" inherent in literary and cultural production. Italian Signs, American Streets promises to become a landmark in the understanding of literature and culture produced by Italian Americans. It will be of interest not only to students, critics, and scholars of this ethnic experience, but also to those concerned with American literature in general and the place of immigrant and ethnic literatures within that wide framework.

The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories

The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories PDF

Author: Alessandro Portelli

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2010-03-30

Total Pages: 682

ISBN-13: 9781438416335

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Portelli offers a new and challenging approach to oral history, with an interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective. Examining cultural conflict and communication between social groups and classes in industrial societies, he identifies the way individuals strive to create memories in order to make sense of their lives, and evaluates the impact of the fieldwork experience on the consciousness of the researcher. By recovering the value of the story-telling experience, Portelli's work makes delightful reading for the specialist and non-specialist alike.

Italian Folk

Italian Folk PDF

Author: Joseph Sciorra

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0823232654

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Sunday dinners, basement kitchens, and backyard gardens are everyday cultural entities long associated with Italian Americans, yet the general perception of them remains superficial and stereotypical at best. For many people, these scenarios trigger ingrained assumptions about individuals' beliefs, politics, aesthetics, values, and behaviors that leave little room for nuance and elaboration. This collection of essays explores local knowledge and aesthetic practices, often marked as "folklore," as sources for creativity and meaning in Italian-American lives. As the contributors demonstrate, folklore provides contemporary scholars with occasions for observing and interpreting behaviors and objects as part of lived experiences. Its study provides new ways of understanding how individuals and groups reproduce and contest identities and ideologies through expressive means. Italian Folk offers an opportunity to reexamine and rethink what we know about Italian Americans. The contributors to this unique book discuss historic and contemporary cultural expressions and religious practices from various parts of the United States and Canada to examine how they operate at local, national, and transnational levels. The essays attest to people's ability and willingness to create and reproduce certain cultural modes that connect them to social entities such as the family, the neighborhood, and the amorphous and fleeting communities that emerge in large-scale festivals and now on the Internet. Italian Americans abandon, reproduce, and/or revive various cultural elements in relationship to ever-shifting political, economic, and social conditions. The results are dynamic, hybrid cultural forms such as valtaro accordion music, Sicilian oral poetry, a Columbus Day parade, and witchcraft (stregheria). By taking a closer look and an ethnographic approach to expressive behavior, we see that Italian-American identity is far from being a linear path of assimilation from Italian immigrant to American of Italian descent but is instead fraught with conflict, negotiation, and creative solutions. Together, these essays illustrate how folklore is evoked in the continual process of identity revaluation and reformation.