Beyond "pizza" and "nonna"! Or, what's bad about Italian/American criticism? Further directions for Italian/American cultural studies (1).

Now that my title has attracted your attention, I need to confess that the goal of this essay is not to discuss "pizza" or "nonna"; rather, I wish to go beyond some of the traditional and, I would underscore, comforting signs of Italian Americana and call attention to that which we may not always wish to recognize: that is, critical discourse on Italian/American cultural productions, which does not necessarily advance the cause, whoever's cause it may be. If anything, then, these two comforting nouns appear in my title as two signs/interpretants, as Charles Sanders Peirce would label them, (2) that signify greatly both within and beyond the greater Italian/American community. That is, food and family are great themes ubiquitous in Italian/American cultural productions, and rightfully so, I would submit.

To be sure, Helen Barolini tells us that her "first memory of [Italy] is gastronomic," a "kind of transcendental exaltation" equal to "that solemn moment of First Communion." (3) Be it the spaghetti and coffee dinner in Little Caesar or the meals prepared that have become [in]famous from such films as Coppola's The Godfather or Scorsese's Italianamerican and Goodfellas, some of these menus and recipes have in fact become objects of desire. (4) Family, in turn, is equally ubiquitous and cannot be ignored as a one of the major themes of creative Italian America. Again, I would briefly reference The Godfather, Italianamerican, as well as True Love and Betsy's Wedding. So, while I shall not discuss these two Italian/American signs par excellence, I should underscore that regardless of my choice to silence them in this specific venue, I do not intend to signal in any sense at all that we should eschew these signs in our work as either critics or creative writers. Anzi, to borrow from the "old country"!

As readers of texts, then, I would suggest that we engage in more than what seems to have occurred until about a decade or so ago. That is, while I do not want to underscore a Clemenzean practice of something like "leave the thematics and grab the theory," I do believe that as a community we have come late to theoretical issues as part of our analytical arsenal; this is especially true if we are to presume to construct and to articulate a discourse that is supposed to travel beyond the confines of Italian America. The costs are simply too high.

In his preface to Franco Mulas's Studies on Italian-American Literature, Fred L. Gardaphe tells us that the "criticism of Italian American literature is not so much a new field, as it is unknown" (vii). (5) This sentence was published in 1992 and, in some cases, is equally relevant today. In the past few years we have seen the publication of essays and books on Italian/American literature that continue to exhibit lacunae of various sorts. There are those who ignore, or are ignorant of, what has preceded them; those who misrepresent what they read; those who re-write what others have already written; and those who eschew--what is today in the twenty-first century a sine qua non--theoretical issues of literary criticism. (6) Indeed, many might say that much of this is nothing new in the general history of literary criticism. But when that literary critical voice is still young and in need of discoursing externally, as is the situation with Italian/American criticism, it is even more incumbent upon the critic to be aware of his/her surroundings.

When I opened Pellegrino D' Acierno's The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts for the first time, I was surprised by the prefatory words offered up by the series' editor. In his "Preface" to the volume, subtitled "Making a Point of It," George J. Leonard, editor in chief, tells us:

   Not until this volume's articles were massed together did anyone,
   even the authors, become aware of this phenomenon ["a strong
   ethnic component to their art," as he states in closing his
   previous paragraph]. An odd silence had masked the event....
   One may have succeeded by drawing on one's Italian-ness ... but
   one did so quietly, "without making a point of it." This book
   then, makes a point of it; uncovering those great debts without
   which one cannot fully understand these artists or their art,
   dealing with their denial, with "lacultura negata." (xv-xvi)

When I read these words, I was, I must admit, a bit dumbfounded. I thought: and what about Barolini and Gardaphe? These two people have always worked both creatively and critically within an Italian/American milieu. Equally significant, perhaps even more egregious, is the minimization of Rose Basile Green's contribution The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures, mentioned in this volume only by Barolini and Gardaphe. Then, I mused: and Bona and Viscusi? A compound voice of the younger and more established critical Italian America, together these two cover thirty-years of literary analysis. Then, there are also those who are not contributors to this volume and whose names easily come to mind: John Ciardi, Felix Stefanile, Joseph Tusiani, and Frances Winwar are four elders who have always worked in both milieus, the creative and the critical.

Indeed, the list goes on of the unmentioned! For along with Rose Basile Green's history of Italian/American narrative, other significant books have also preceded the publication of The Italian American Heritage. Helen Barolini's groundbreaking anthology, The Dream Book." An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women, paved the way as the first of its kind. This was followed by another best-seller, From the Margin: Writings in Italian American, edited by Tamburri, Giordano, and Gardaphe, and Studies in Italian-American Folklore, edited by Luisa Del Giudice, two other collections that helped cement the notion of Italian Americana in the greater landscape of intellectual North America. Soon after, three journals published special issues dedicated to the field: Differentia 6 & 7 (1994); la bella figura: a choice; and Canadian Journal of Italian Studies (1996). To be sure, these two books, the special issues, and other publications too numerous to mention in this context owe a debt not only to Basile Green and her work, but also to the unfinished notebook, published posthumously (1949), that Olga Peragallo had hoped to develop into a full-fledged study (she, too, by the way, is mentioned here only by Barolini and Gardaphe). Therefore, to paraphrase the words I first cited above, these are indeed some "great debts without which one cannot fully understand [Italian/American] artists or their art," for which the notion of "la cultura negata" now becomes relevant also in a much larger sense vis-a-vis the compilation of The Italian American Heritage. (7)

The Italian American Heritage is not alone in this type of "historical breach," as one author recently described the paucity of critical attention to Italian/American writing (Scambray 19). A few other books recently published that do not necessarily go beyond the threshold of thematic and/or critical recounting--dare I say discounting, if not misreading--of what has been said before may come to mind. I said earlier that the costs are too high. How? I would use the recent publication of Werner Sollors's Multilingual America as one example of why we need to (1) be aware of what has preceded us within and from without Italian America and (2) cross the critical thresholds of Italian America and discourse with others through our criticism of Italian/American texts. Sollors' book is divided into eight sections that include, in all, twenty-eight essays. Two are dedicated to Italian/American literature. They are: "The Strange Case of Luigi Donato Ventura's Peppino: Some Speculations on the Beginnings of Italian-American Fiction," by Mario Maffi, and "The Formulation of an Italian-American Identity through Popular Theater," by Anna Maria Martellone. Nine and five pages respectively represent Italian/American writing in lingua, we might say.

Oddly, I would add, Peppino, as many of us are aware, was in fact written in French. In addition, oddly, it is dubbed by Maffi as the "foundational fiction for Italian-American literature" (166). (8) Maffi does present a nice reading of Ventura's Peppino filled with some intriguing, though debatable, points; and for this reason, his piece left this reader unsatisfied. For instance, while Maffi's three "main stages [of] the construction of America" (168) appear intriguing at the outset, it is clear that he has willy-nilly rewritten to some degree Basile Green's four stages of the Italian/American writer, if not, to some extent metaphorically, Aaron's three stages of the "hyphenate writer." More significantly, I would submit, Maffi's three stages also resonate with Peirce's semiotic triade of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Ironically, none of these three critics (Basile Green, Aaron, Peirce) appears anywhere in his essay, each of whom dates back to 1974, 1964, and 1961, respectively.

Whereas Maffi does attempt a rigorous analysis of the work in question, Martellone offers up a brief reading of Italian/American theater filtered, so it seems, partly through Emelise Aleandri's previous work on the same subject. (9) The Italian/American identity presented in this note (as Martellone herself considers her contribution to this volume) is based on notions of corna and vendetta. To be sure, one would have wished that the author had concentrated on another aspect of Italian/American identity, something not so stereotypical of the southern Italian. I highlight the adjective "southern" precisely because of the historical rift between southern and northern Italy, and also because Italian immigrants and their progeny deserve both better and more accurate treatment, especially in this regard. The disservice done to the southern Italian immigrant here is just too egregious to ignore.

By their very presence in this book, the two contributions by Maffi and Martellone raise the following question: why, when there is so much being written in the United States by some of the very best critics of Italian/American literature, who have been writing for decades (Helen Barolini, Fred Gardaphe, and Robert Viscusi, to mention three whose work dates back into the 1980s, if not earlier), does a most able anthologist working in the United States ethnic milieu go elsewhere for contributors for entries on Italian/American literature, albeit literature in Italian? Precisely because Barolini, Gardaphe, and Viscusi are all bilingual, the question seems to resonate more loudly. Furthermore, were one to argue for an outside perspective in such cases as in that of Sollors, we might expect to find an essay by someone such as Franca Bernabei, William Boelhower, Emilio Franzina, if not Claudio Gorlier, Alessandro Portelli, or Cosmo Siani, expert critics in the field who have already done significant work in this area. (10)

Such musings, of course, continue, especially when one considers the brevity of and apparent gaps in Maffi's and Martellone's contributions. Namely, what does such an apparent lack of information and/or knowledge on the part of these two Italian critics tell us, if anything, about the reception, or lack thereof, of Italian/American literature in Italy? How, for example, is the notion of an Italian/American literature negotiated in departments of North American studies in Italian universities? (11) These are two basic questions, I would submit, that need to be asked, indeed heeded, when historical and/or analytical anthologies and/or studies such as Multilingual America are compiled. The answers are surely complex, and some might prefer a more in-depth analysis than we can offer in this context.

Briefly, however, we surely perceive some good fortune in the commercial realm; and I would be remiss not to mention that certain Italian/American writers are very much read in Italy. For along with the so-called usual suspects such as David Baldacci, Don DeLillo, and other bestsellers, it was a wonderful surprise a few years ago to see, literally, piles of copies of John Fante's works in all the major bookstores in Florence and Rome, for example. It was also most comforting to see writers such as Sandro Veronesi and his contemporaries, as well, writing prefaces and translating such writers. More recently, Pascal D'Angelo's, Joe Pagano's, and Helen Barolini's major works have also appeared in Italian, thanks here to the likes of Antonio Corbusiero in the first case and Francesco Durante for Pagano and Barolini.

As for Italian/American studies being taught in departments of North American studies in Italy, the situation is still in an embryonic stage. While some Italian/American writers are studied in a variety of classes in North/American studies, very few universities have courses dedicated specifically to Italian/American studies: these are obviously found for the most part in those places where the few specialists teach. Still in an early stage is the notion that someone might obtain a specialization in Italian/American studies, though the past decade has been more fruitful in college graduates in this field, as theses dedicated to Italian Americans are now more numerous than ever before. (12)

A second example of one's unawareness of what has preceded us in Italian/American literature is, we might say, more internal and demonstrated by Gay Talese in his 1993 essay, "Where Are the Italian American Novelists?" Until the appearance of this essay, Talese, to my knowledge, had never truly negotiated in any profound manner the cultural terrain of Italian America, except of course for his 1970 bestseller, Honor Thy Father, a journalistic investigation into the history of the irreputable Joe Bonanno crime family. The book eventually earned Talese a great deal of respect in the world of print journalism and consequently solidified his name as one of the founders of what was then dubbed "new journalism." (13) The type of activity that Talese exhibited in his 1993 essay on the Italian/American novel, nevertheless, resembles to some degree what I have informally dubbed, in conversation with friends, as intellectual ethnic slumming: that is, a visitation upon the greater realm of, in our case, Italian America by someone whose quotidian space is, to the contrary, the canonical world, and yet, every once in a while, decides to visit the Italian/American masses, so to speak, for an array of reasons, many of which are not always clear.

In his essay, Talese demonstrates precisely how misinformed he was at that time of the extent to which the Italian/American novel had already been in existence. (14) Rose Basile Green, as mentioned earlier, had already documented the history of Italian/American novels in her study, The Italian-American Novel, both in the ninety-plus number of books she discussed within her main text and the more than two hundred entries of novels she listed in her bibliography. The question then, for Talese, should have been not so much "where are the novelists?" but "why are the novelists ignored?" Talese himself, however, was obviously not familiar with the Italian/American fictional landscape, for which the more relevant and therefore exceedingly more significant question to pose did not form part of his semiotic horizon.

But there is another side to the metaphorical coin of ethnic slumming, and it is Gramscian in content, to be sure. Namely, what are the duties and/or responsibilities, if any, of someone involved, however so slightly, in Italian Americana? Must this person take on that Gramscian role, or some semblance thereof, of the "organic intellectual," or can (should?) s/he just go about his/her business and do his/her thing as the individual s/he is? This, too, is an issue that clearly deserves more time and space than can be allotted here. But I would be remiss nevertheless were I not to, at least, raise the question, thus provoking my reader(s) to ponder further the issue of the group versus the individual, that person similar to a Gay Talese who has the ability (read, cultural currency) to further the group's cause. (15) This is an age-old question that Italian Americans need to tackle since we can now readily say that we have, literally and cinematographically, arrived.

Mario Maffi, Anna Maria Martellone, and Gay Talese are not alone in their "breach," as Kenneth Scambray has labeled such performances. Ironically, as we shall see, this very critic of the "breach" engages in an analogous infraction. In his above-mentioned The North American ltalian Renaissance." Italian Writing in America and Canada, Scambray offers us a big title for his small book. Such a title promises a great deal, and much of what one might expect from such a title can surely not be included in one-hundred-thirty pages; the author, in fact, informs us of this discrepancy. There are two other aspects of the title I would mention at the outset. First, the initial definite article, "the," may readily close out, at first glance, any possibility of room for play; for this work is neither definitive nor clearly representative of the two literary fields in question. Second, given the sensitivity to language that is characteristic of Guernica and its publisher/director, I wonder about the use of the geo-cultural label "America" as opposed to "United States": after all, Canada is one of numerous parts of America. Indeed, in concert with "sensitivity to language," I also wonder at Scambray's later use of the adjective "Italic" in place of the more commonly used binomials "Italian American" or "Italian Canadian." (16) Within an Italianate context, especially, a term such as "Italic" conjures up a variety of thoughts and images, one of the first being the semiotic relationship between the sign/Italic/and the general historical context of the twentieth-century Italian ventennio, that noun which signals Italy's darkest time of the last century, the Fascist regime. The Italian equivalent of "Italic" was substituted by the regime for what had always been labeled "Italian," one of many signs that marked Mussolini's attempt to recreate in twentieth-century Italy notions reminiscent of the Roman Empire.

In his able introduction, Scambray tells us that the "essays that follow represent a cross-section of the Italian American and Italian Canadian literature written over the past thirty years" (18). Indeed, many of the works he discusses "form a coherent part of the Italic narrative in North America" (18); however, I find some writers missing, even for an admittedly limited work, as Scambray humbly tells us. In his bibliography of poetry, nine writers are mentioned; and while I shall not muse on some of those included at the expense of others excluded, I wonder about the following absences. For United States poetry, by no means a conclusive list, the following are not present: David Citino, Emanuele di Pasquale, W. S. Di Piero, Diane Di Prima, Jonathan Galassi, Sandra Gilbert, Dana Gioia, Daniella Gioseffi, Gerard Malanga, Michael Palma, Jay Parini, Stephen Sartarelli, Felix Stefanile, John Tagliabue, Lewis Turco, Joseph Tusiani, Paul Vangelisti. For Canada, in turn, the not listed include: Lisa Carducci, Celestino De Iuliis, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Mary Di Michele, Antonino Mazza, Pasquale Verdicchio (Canada and United States). Similar lists can be made for prose writers: Tony Ardizzone, Rita Ciresi, Giose Rimanelli, and Anthony Valerio constitute conspicuous absences from the lower forty-eight; whereas the likes of Genni Gunn, Mary Melfi, Frank Paci, and Nino Ricci are among the Canadians herein not mentioned. A handful of anthologies and other critical studies are also lacking, but I shall spare my reader other lists at this point.

This underscores, as Scambray himself states, that the study of Italian/American and Italian/Canadian literature, indeed, "cannot be viewed separately from history and culture" (18), which must include all significant studies and anthologies whenever possible, however marginal they may seem. By the time this book went to press in the fall of 2000, a number of relevant anthologies (at least three) and critical studies (at least five) had already appeared alongside the likes of Barolini's The Dream Book and Gardaphe's Italian Signs, American Streets. Since this is a "small ... representation of the historical breach," then an editorial decision might have prompted a more representative title for the volume. (17) Something similar to "Breaking the Silence," the title of one of Robert Viscusi's often-cited essays, seems more appropriate for this collection of previously published reviews. At the same time, it would have also paid homage to, indeed, the first contemporary thinker of Italian/American studies who purposefully breached the long-practiced, thematic-based criticism, thus bringing Italian/ American critical studies into the contemporary world of literary studies.

There are two other books I would like to discuss briefly before passing on to the more prescriptive section of this essay: Mary Ann Mannino's Revisionary Identities: Strategies of Empowerment in the Writing of Italian/American Women and Mary Francis Pipino's "I have found my voice": The Italian/American Woman Writer. In a review of Mary Jo Bona's 1999 study, Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers, I stated that it was a necessary book for two basic reasons: first, it provided us with what had been missing vis-a-vis Italian/American female writers; second, it served as a model for future books to come. I completed my review at the end of 2001 and had both Mannino and Pipino in mind. (18)

1997 and 1996 are the respective dates for the latest bibliographic entry in each book. This becomes significant, I would submit, because in the second book, especially, Fred Gardaphe's seminal work, Italian Signs, American Streets, is nowhere to be found, whereas Bona cites works as late as 1998 in her book. Indeed, one cannot downplay Gardaphe's pivotal study, especially when he discusses at length three writers (Helen Barolini, Mary Caponegro, and Carole Maso) whom Pipino reads four years later, and Gardaphe appears once in her fifty-plus pages dedicated to these three writers. In so doing, Pipino ignores not only Gardaphe but also Daniel Aaron in her discussion of various stages of "literal and literary assimilation" in her chapter dedicated to Dorothy Calvetti Bryant. From Gardaphe, Pipino could have learned of Aaron's keenly insightful essay, and the subsequent benefits would have been obvious. (19)

Mary Ann Mannino's study exhibits similar characteristics. In his review of Revisionary Identities, Fred Gardaphe tell us that this book (1) is "designed to help us understand the way Italian American women writers identify themselves"; and (2): "advances our awareness of the complexities at work in the creation and consumption of the fiction and poetry of American women writers of Italian descent" (91). (20) While what Gardaphe says here is true in a general sense, it is also true that the deficiencies in this book also advance "our awareness of the complexities at work in the ... consumption" (Gardaphe 91) of Italian/American women's writing. In some cases Mannino seems indeed to glide over the sources of her study, concerned more with the buzz words/phrases she might find in them than to absorb and digest what her predecessors--Italian Americans and not--had to say in those sources. (21)

What I am obviously speaking to in all of the cases I discuss above is a sense of accountability and responsibility vis-a-vis the critical act. Indeed, there are numerous sources that may escape our attention; undoubtedly, we have all missed something in our work along the way. However, when those sources lacking are, instead, ubiquitous in our semiotic sphere, the critical act in question falls under suspicion of incompleteness and, thus, unreliability with regard to the chronological points of origin of those ideas therein articulated.

Why such lacunae occur is not an easy issue to resolve. With the intention not to impugn anyone's motives, I simply would submit that some of the misinformation, misrepresentation, and ignorance of previous sources may in part be due to the fact that the field of Italian/American criticism is still a young voice, as I mentioned at the outset. This being the case, two reasons come to mind that might contribute to such lacunae. First, some of those engaged in the field may indeed be overwhelmed by their zeal and thus fall victim to haste, which could very well contribute to overlooking certain sources, especially those books and essays that are either out of print or are included in limited publishing venues such as small presses or journals with a restricted print-run. Second, with the number of publications of books and journals still limited in comparison with other fields of ethnic study, a network of intellectual interchange among Italian Americans has yet to be firmly established, for which the existence of important sources may not readily come to light in everyone's semiotic sphere. Nevertheless, we must also admit that models for a thorough examination of the works in question are not lacking: I would list among them Mary Jo Bona, Fred Gardaphe, Edvige Giunta, (22) and Robert Viscusi, to name a few. (23)

What can we do about this? I believe a number of people have already begun to work in this arena of "inter-ethnicizing" Italian/American textual (read also, visual) criticism by engaging in comparative ethnic studies, by incorporating theoretical tools into their analyses when possible, and by constructing critical paradigms that can further aid us in decoding our written and visual texts; among others, Viscusi, Gardaphe, and Bona come to mind in this regard. (24) Thus, as I have stated elsewhere, (25) precisely because the social and cultural dynamics of the United States reveal a constant flux of changes originating in the very existence of the various differentiated ethnic/racial groups that constitute the overall population of the United States, Italian/American intellectuals must continue to reshape their roles, even if ever so slightly, from that of a raconteur of what took place, a role that may lean more toward nostalgia than analysis, to that of cultural examiner and, eventually, cultural broker.

It is precisely with regard to this new role, something which has already manifested itself in a number of Italian/American intellectuals, that the notions and tools of what we know as cultural studies and/or multiculturalism can aid us immensely. In general, we may consider cultural studies as that mode of analysis that takes as its focal point of argument, as Stuart Hall tells us, "the changing ways of life of societies and groups and the networks of meanings that individuals and groups use to make sense of and to communicate with each other" (10). What is of primary significance is Hall's insistence on plurality (societies and groups) and interconnectedness (to communicate with each other). Hall's plurality and interconnectedness form an obvious and necessary couplet that resulted from the changing attitude toward the notion of melting pot (the rejection of assimilation) and that was ultimately supplanted by any one of the many metaphors and similes which readily connote difference and individuality of all groups that constitute the United States population. (26)

But cultural studies must also be "critical" insofar as it must be more than the "mere description of cultural emergents that aims to give voice to the 'experience' of those who have been denied a space to talk," as Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton describe what they distinguish as "dominant" or "experiential cultural studies," which "offers a 'description' of the exotic 'other' and thus provides the bourgeois reader with the pleasure of contact with difference" (8). (27) Instead, for them, critical cultural studies "is not a description but an explanation, not a testimonial but an intervention: it does not simply 'witness' cultural events, but takes a 'position' regarding them" (8). (28) As both Hall, and Zavarzadeh and Morton, underscore, change is the operative word. For Zavarzadeh and Morton, especially, critical cultural studies should constitute "an articulation of the cultural real that will change the conditions which have blocked those voices from talking" (8).

If we accept the premise that cultural studies represents, among other things as stated above, "the weakening of the traditional boundaries among the disciplines and of the growth of forms of interdisciplinary research that doesn't easily fit ... within the confines of existing divisions of knowledge" (Hall 11), then we may surely open ourselves up to different modes of analysis that go beyond those "traditional boundaries" of literary study so often concerned with the formalistic and the thematic. Mere rhetoric and signification should not suffice; other critical perspectives should become part of our interpretive arsenal. This is especially true since many contemporary Italian/American writers avail themselves of certain generative tools that were not necessarily popular a decade or two ago, generative tools that have their origin in a number of different sources: in different national cultures, if not the epistemological collision of different national cultures; (29) in critical thinkers becoming creative writers; in the influence of other media on the written word; in the incorporation of popular cultural forms with those considered more high-brow; or in the high-browization and/or glorification of the popular arts, such as film, romance narratives, and music videos.

One such arsenal we may wish to investigate as a source of critical ammunition is that dedicated to the examination of post-colonial literature. One voice in what has become a wide field of study among those already well known is that of Aijaz Ahmad. (30) In his response to Jameson's essay on national allegory and third-world literature, Ahmad took issue with what he considered Jameson's limited and reductive assumption that third-world literature revolves primarily around the notion of a national allegory. This notion that literature may revolve primarily around one or two notions in order for it to be considered such--or perhaps because it is considered such and not something else--may be seen as an analogue to the case of some ethnic literatures in the United States: namely, that an ethnic literary piece has to contain certain thematic motifs or adopt specific formalistic structures in order for it to be considered part of that certain ethnic rubric. Otherwise, the work and its author are considered not to belong to that very same group of hyphenated writers. This somewhat reductive notion of categorizing art forms indeed limits our ways of examining them.

Returning now to Ahmad's essay, we see that what is more relevant here, then, are not so much his objections to Jameson, as his own notions that stand at the base of such criticisms. Therefore, bouncing off of some of Ahmad's notions immediate to post-colonial literature, we may indeed state that with regard to the notion of ethnic literature--or for that matter any other literature (31)--such a notion, first of all, cannot be "constructed as an internally coherent object of theoretical knowledge"; that such a categorization "cannot be resolved ... without an altogether positivist reductionism" (4). Secondly, other "literary traditions [e.g., third world, ethnic, etc.] remain, beyond a few texts here and there, [often] unknown to the [dominant culture's] literary theorist" (5). Thirdly, and perhaps most relevant, "[l]iterary texts are produced in highly differentiated, usually over-determined contexts of competing ideological and cultural clusters, so that any particular text of any complexity shall always have to be placed within the cluster that gives it its energy and form, before it is totalised into a universal category" (23; my emphasis). These three notions, I would suggest, constitute a significant ideological flame-work of cluster specificity within which Italian/American intellectuals could, and indeed should, consider further the notion of Italian/American literature as a valid category of United States literature and re-think the significance of the Italian/American writer within the recategorization of a more generalized notion of the so-called "hyphenate writer" (see Gioia).

Such a strategy responds to a necessity of inclusiveness of all groups. For until all groups--the so-called dominant class and non-dominants--are included in a cultural discourse, we run the risk of: 1) maintaining the obvious aesthetic hierarchy of a major literature and numerous minor literatures; 2) remaining stuck within a thematically grounded discourse of nostalgia, for which only leitmotifs such as pizza and nonna retain aesthetic currency; and 3) conserving the divisiveness that seems to exist today, precisely because an aesthetic hierarchy is maintained, both within and outside of the Italian/American community, of creative writers and critical thinkers. With "its focus on the politics of the production of subjectivities rather than on textual operations, [cultural studies] understands 'politics' as access to the material base of [power, knowledge, and resources]" (Zavarzadeh and Morton 208). Cultural studies also "insists on the necessity to address [these] central, urgent, and disturbing questions of a society and a culture [in] the most rigorous intellectual way ... available" (Hall 11). It thus "constitutes one of the points of tension and change at the frontiers of intellectual and academic life, pushing for new questions, new models, and new ways of study, testing the fine lines between intellectual rigor and social relevance" (Hall 11). For only when all these concerns are addressed and all United States identifiable groups and their differences are foregrounded on equal terms through the exploratory lens of cultural studies (one thing that must take place both within and outside the Italian/American community) can then the notion of multiculturalism function effectively as a useful expression of difference, (32) leading ultimately to a more level field of play for critical discourse and intellectual exchange.

If there is one thing we have learned, it is that literary and/or critical theory, in the hands of today's well-informed reader (i.e., one who is conversant with a general notion of post-structuralism), has the potential to cast aside the old lens of the monolith and reconsider Italian/American literature though a more prismatic lens that allows us to see the different nooks and crannies of our ethnicity as it has changed over the decades and across generations from a dualistic discourse to a multifaceted conglomeration of cultural processes transgressing Italian, American (read, here, also Canada and United States, as one indeed should), and Italian/American cultural borders. Indeed, the works of Robert Viscusi, Fred Gardaphe, Mary Jo Bona, Daniel Aaron et al. afford their readers the hermeneutic freedom to read as they semiotically wish, while still remaining context sensitive, as Umberto Eco warns we should.

Appendix

Italian/American Literature & Film: Criticism & Biographies

In the spirit of providing a bibliography more specific to literary and film criticism, I offer the following bibliography of books and encyclopedia available to date. Not listed for reasons of space and equally significant are the annual publications of American Italian Historical Association. Apologies to anyone omitted in film and literary criticism.

Alfonsi, Ferdinando P. Poesia Italo-Amerieana: Saggi e Testi/Italian American Poetry: Essays and Texts. Catanzaro: Carello Editore, 1991.

Alfonsi, Ferdinando P., ed. Poeti Italo-Americani e Italo-Canadesi/Italo American and Italo-Canadian Poets. Catanzaro: Carello Editore, 1994.

--. Poeti Italo-Americani/Italian American Poets. Catanzaro: Carello Editore, 1985.

--. Dictionary of Italian-American Poets. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.

Barolini, Helen. Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity. Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1999 (Bordighera, 1997).

Barolini, Helen, ed. The Dream Book. An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women. New York: Schocken, 1985.

Basile Green, Rose. The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction between Two Cultures. Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1974.

Boelhower, William. Immigrant Autobiography in the United States: Four Versions of the Italian American Self. Verona: Essedue, 1982.

--. Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1987 (Helvetia 1984).

Boelhower, William and Rocco Pallone, ed. Adjusting Sites: New Essays in Italian American Studies. Stony Brook NY: FILibrary, 1999.

Bona, Mary Jo. Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999.

Bona, Mary Jo, ed. The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian American Women's Fiction. Toronto: Guernica, 1994.

Camaiti Hostert, Anna and A.J. Tamburri, ed. Scene italoamericane: rappre-sentazioni cinematografiche degli italoamericani negli Stati Uniti. Roma: Luca Sossella Editore, 2002.

Camaiti Hostert, Anna and A.J. Tamburri, ed. Screening Ethnicity: Cinematographic Representations of Italian Americans in the United States. Boca Raton FL: Bordighera, 2002.

Capone, Giovanna (Janet), Denise Leto, and Tommi Avicolli Mecca, ed. Hey Paesan: Lesbians and Gay Men of Italian Descent. Oakland: Three Guineas P, 1999.

Ciongoli, Kenneth & Jay Parini, ed. Beyond the Godfather: Italian American Writers of the Real Italian American Experience. Hanover NH: U of New England P, 1998.

Collins, Richard. John Fante: A Literary Portrait. Toronto: Guernica, 1999.

Cooper, Stephen and David Fine, ed. John Fante: A Critical Gathering. Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999.

Cooper, Stephen. Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante. New York: FSG, 2000.

D'Acierno, Pellegrino, ed. The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts. New York: Garland, 1999.

D'Alfonso, Antonio and Pasquale Verdicchio. Duologue: On Culture and Identity. Toronto: Guernica, 1998.

D'Alfonso, Antonio. In Italics. Toronto: Guernica, 1996.

Diomede, Matthew. Pietro di Donato, the Master Builder. Cranbury NJ: Associated UP, Bucknell UP, 1995.

Gardaphe, Fred L. Dagoes Read. Toronto: Guernica, 1996.

--. The Italian/American Writer. An Annotated Checklist. Spencertown NY: Forkroads, 1995.

--. Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

Gardaphe, Fred L. and James Periconi. Bibliography of the Italian American Book. New York: IAWA, 2000.

Giordano, Paolo A. and Anthony Julian Tamburri, ed. Beyond the Margin: Readings in Italian Americana. Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1998.

Giunta, Edvige. Writing with An Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

LaGumina, Salvatore, Frank J. Cavaioli, Salvatore Primeggia, and Joseph A. Varacalli, ed. The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 2000.

Loriggio, Francesco, ed. Literary History and Social Pluralism: The Literature of the Italian Emigration. Toronto: Guernica, 1996.

Lourdeaux, Lee. Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola, and Scorsese. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990.

Mannino, Mary Ann. Revisionary Identities: Strategies of Empowerment in the Writing of Italian/American Women. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

Mulas, Francesco. Studies on Italian-American Literature. Staten Island NY: Center for Migration Studies, 1992.

Napolitano, Louise. An American Story: Pietro di Donato's "Christ in Concrete." New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

Peragallo Olga. Italian-American Authors and Their Contribution to American Literature. New York: S.F. Vanni, 1949.

Pipino, Mary Francis, "I have found my voice": The Italian-American Woman Writer. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

Pivato, Joseph. Echos. Toronto: Guernica, 1994.

Romano, Rose, ed., la bella figura: a choice. San Francisco: malafemmina p, 1993.

Scambray, Kenneth. The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in American and Canada. Toronto: Guernica, 2000.

Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Italian/American Short Films & Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading. West Lafayette IN: Purdue UP, 2002.

Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Fred Gardaphe, Edvige Giunta, and Mary Jo Bona, ed. Italian/American Literature and Film. A Select Bibliography. West Lafayette IN: Bordighera, 1997.

Tamburri, Anthony Julian. A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer. Albany NY: SUNY P, 1998.

--. To Hyphenate or Not To Hyphenate? The Italian/American Writer: An Other American. Montreal: Guernica, 1991.

--. ed. FUORI." Essays By Italian/American Lesbians and Gays. Introduction by Mary Jo Bona. West Lafayette IN: Bordighera, 1996.

Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphe, ed. From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana. 2nd ed. West Lafayette IN: Purdue UP, 2000.

Verdicchio, Pasquale. Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora. Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997.

--. Devils in Paradise: Writings on Post-Emigrant Culture. Toronto: Guernica, 1997.

Vitiello, Justin. Poetics and Literature of the Diaspora. Lewiston NY: Edwin Mellen P, 1993.

Journals

Italian Americana

The Italian American Review

Voices in Italian Americana

Special Issues

Differentia, review of italian thought 6 & 7 (Spring/Autumn 1994).

Canadian Journal of Italian Studies 19.2 (1996).

"il viaggio delle donne" Janet Capone and Denise Leto, guest editors. Sinister Wisdom 41 (1990).

Notes

(1.) For more on my use of the slash (/) in place of the hyphen (-), see my To Hyphenate or Not To Hyphenate?

This rassegna (overview) of mine, as the Italians might call it, is culled from various sources I have compiled, digested, and continue to discuss, and thus represents a type of re-thinking, on my part, of what we have thus far acquired, indeed constructed, as an Italian/American critical discourse. I have opted to concentrate on a few books that have appeared in the past few years, as opposed to creating a more lengthy catalogue of what has been produced over the years. To this end, then, I have appended to this "overview" a list of books (anthologies and critical writings) on Italian/American literature and film.

As the tone of my discussion is of a critical nature, I would suggest two essays for a more celebratory discourse on the state of affairs of Italian/American criticism: see Hendin and Belluscio.

(2.) For more on Peirce and ethnicity, see my "In (Re)cognition."

(3.) See Barolini's Festa (1).

(4.) Scorsese's Italianamerican ends with his mother's recipe on screen with the closing credits.

(5.) I shall refrain in this context from discussing Mulas's book. I have already done so elsewhere, speaking to some of the missing voices (e.g., Viscusi and Gardaphe) and "the old lens of the monolith" through which he reads Italian/American literature in his book. See my "Italian/American Literary Discourse."

(6.) In discussing notions of diaphora, differentia, and diversity, Kadir underscores the impact of theory over the past thirty-plus years, a statement that is indeed germane to my discussion here: "The theoretical turn in scholarly and pedagogical discourses of the last third of the twentieth century sensitized us to the constructed nature of national myths and to the repercussively and expediently performative nature of individual and collective cultural identities. The movement generated by this insight has been away from the ontological and toward the functional and epistemic--that is, from what things and cultures are to how they behave and to what ends, as sites of knowledge and regimes of truth" (15).

(7.) Overall, I should add, The Italian American Heritage is an excellent collection despite the infelicities mentioned here and in my detailed review published elsewhere.

(8.) Here, Maffi is quoting Cagidemetrio's "Introduction" to Peppino in Shell and Sollors.

(9.) See Aleandri and Seller, and also Aleandri.

(10.) The one Italian work I would underscore at this time is Franzina's Dall'Arcadia in America: attivita letteraria ed emigrazione transoceanica in Italia (1850-1940), which remains the only work of its kind to date. In it he offers his reader a detailed history of the literary activity that took place during the period in question. The work of the other scholars I have mentioned is in the format of essays or monographs on individual Italian-language or bilingual writers. Other essays of interest may be found in Marchand's edited collection.

(11.) With regard to cinema, the situation is much more fertile, I would say. Italians are very much aware of the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cimino, Quentin Tarantino, Nancy Savoca, and Martin Scorsese, for instance, and individual studies on these filmmakers are numerous. Instead, panoramic book-length studies on Italian/American cinema are very few indeed. To date, two are in print in Italy: Hollywood Italian authored by Casella and Scene italoamericane edited by Camaiti Hostert and Tamburri.

(12.) In this regard I would mention, for instance, Romeo, who contributed an essay on Italian/American literature to the recently published collection Storia dell'emigrazione italiana: arrivi, edited by Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi, and Emilio Franzina, and who has a forthcoming study entitled Tradizione e innovazione nei memoir delle scrittrici italo americane.

(13.) The irony in Talese having written a book on the Bonanno family, however, is that today he is one of the more vocal people against those who adopt similar themes (organized crime) in their work. All this seems to be a 1990s awakening on his part, which appears to have coincided with the publication of his genea-logical account, Unto The Sons.

(14.) The response to Talese was indeed significant. The Times did publish a series of letters, and at subsequent conferences, round tables, and general gatherings of Italian Americans, opinions were often candidly expressed. The journal Italian Americana published a forum, edited by Viscusi, "Where Are The Italian American Novelists? A Candid Exchange on Gay Talese's esssay: with Poetry Editor Dana Gioia and Rita Ciresi, Albert DiBartolomeo, Thomas DePietro, Richard Gambino, Daniella Gioseffi, and Eugene Mirabelli." Two conspicuous names absent are Helen Barolini and Fred Gardaphe: Barolini, the editor of the first anthology of Italian/American writers, and novelist and essayist; Gardaphe, long-time champion of Italian/American literature, essayist, editor, and fiction writer, and more recently, author of the first book-length study of Italian/American narrative (Italian Signs, American Streets) since Basile Green's initial study.

(15.) I need also recommend to my reader the follow-up to Italian Americana's forum on Talese's essay. In the subsequent issue (12.2) Viscusi and Gioia continue the debate and succeed in offering a more insightful set of notions on the subject.

(16.) Scambray uses this term twice in his introduction (15, 18), alternating with the more common binomials I have already mentioned. It is clear, however, that he privileges this dangerously historically-relevant term over the less periodizing couplets "Italian American" or Italian Canadian."

(17.) The general, broad-painting characteristic of the title may seem reflected in an occasional statement Scambray articulates: "La storia informs us of the current state of Italian studies and points out areas that require further research and writing" (24). If anything, La storia is about the Italian experience in the United States, something better characterized as Italian/American studies, not Italian studies. This second area deals, for the most part, with much of what occurs within and/or related to that geo-cultural area that we know as Italy. A minor point? Perhaps. But for those who negotiate the waters of "Italian studies" and "Italian/American studies" one should clearly differentiate between the two geo-cultural zones of intellectual investigation; and such distinction, I would suggest, is significant especially with regard to a rigorous, interpretive analysis of cultural productions of Italian America.

(18.) Neither Mannino nor Pipino cites Bona's book, though they do cite willingly her dissertation from which Claiming a Tradition derives. Indeed, there was only one year between the publication date of Bona and both Mannino and Pipino, so we may very well understand the absence of any reference to Bona's 1999 publication.

(19.) These are just a few points I find problematic in this book. I would also point to what seems to be a bit of name-dropping, in order to beef-up, so to speak, the theoretical foundation of her discourse. The relevance of Daly's Gyn/Ecology, for instance, which Pipino mentions almost en passant (111), had already been made in greater detail in 1991 (See my "Umbertina").

(20.) See his review, "In Need of Revision." Gardaphe, in the meantime, continues: "While there can be no doubt that Mannino's pursuit is a noble one, her application of a variety of theories to the works leaves much to be desired. Revisionary Identities suffers from a lack of editorial direction and assistance in such important areas as style and content. Anyone familiar with the previous book-length studies and essays by such leading experts as Mary Jo Bona, Edvige Giunta, and Anthony Julian Tamburri, will note these deficiencies immediately. Unfortunately, Mannino's work never reaches the heights of her predecessors and thus becomes a hesitant first step into the field" (91).

(21.) This, too, is a major criticism Gardaphe expresses. He states: "While it is obvious that the author has consulted some of the major sources in the field, it is not clear whether she did more than read her predecessors for quotes that she could extract in support of her argument. An example of this problem is found in her misreading of Tamburri's explanation of the use of the slash instead of the hyphen in constructing the adjective Italian/American, and her non-reading of Tamburri's study, A Semiotic of Ethnicity." Indeed, Gardaphe is generous in my regard to underscore two notions/works I previously published. But he was even more generous to Mannino in not being more specific in egregious misrepresentation of others' previous work. At the risk of seeming egocentric, since I already cited this essay of mine before (see note 19), Mannino mis-characterizes my 1991 reading of Barolini's Umbertina when she tells her reader that my essay "focused on the assimilation of the characters and thus read the text as primarily an ethnic fiction" (130). Indeed, a bit less than one-half of my essay dealt with the ethnic aspect of the novel; the remainder of the essay dealt with the gender dilemma Barolini so effectively portrays within an Italian/American milieu.

(22.) See also Giunta's most recent publication, Writing with An Accent.

(23.) Before passing on to my more prescriptive, second section, I would mention a most recent example of someone who is a bit misinformed on the subject matter and yet pronounces generalities that might very well mislead the uninformed reader. I refer to Rotella's review, "Beyond the Shadow of the Mob." In reading his review, we might readily believe that the "current state of [Italian/American] literature" is either about food or predominantly non-fiction. This is because, we are told, "serious writing" and "successful writers" such as DeLillo, Baldacci, Lamb, Russo, and Scottoline "have avoided placing Italian American themes or characters at the center of their work." This may be true in some of these writers. But let us also not forget that, along with DeLillo's more recent venture into Italian America with his novel Underworld, Lamb and Scottoline have indeed infused their work with Italian/American characters and/or plot lines. Worrisome are opinions presented as something more reliable than what they simply are, as is the case with this review. And so we read: "When it comes to books about Italians, readers 'tend to think of cookbooks or a book about the mob,' observed Kris Kleindienst, co-owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Mo." Or, equally brow-raising is Rotella's dependency on a distributor's inventory as opposed to something more objective, such as either Books in Print or the Library of Congress catalogue, Ingram's database of active titles is precisely that: those titles that Ingram believes will sell, not those titles that are currently in print (i.e., Books in Print) or have at one time or another been printed (Library of Congress). What Rotella thus ultimately does by relying on a commercial distributor, such as Ingrain, is to deny the history of all those other books, and by extension the very category of Italian/American literature, that have not made it to the warehouses of large distributors.

(24.) The specific works I have in mind are: Viscusi, "De vulgari eloquentia; Gardaphe, Italian Signs, American Streets; and Bona. For a semiotic paradigm for reading Italian/American literature, see my A Semiotic of Ethnicity, chapter 1.

(25.) I first discussed these issues in my "Italian/American Cultural Studies"; now in my A Semiotic of Ethnicity, chapter 8.

(26.) Again, I would cite Kadir and his notion of permanence vis-a-vis such difference and individuality that subtends the United States population. He correctly states the following, I would contend: "Few things exacerbate epistemic crisis as much as polyphonic disruption and heterogeneity. In the United States of America, this has meant many voices contending at once and a simultaneous multiplicity of identities remonstrating for political and socioeconomic recognition. The hardening of this myriad plurality into distinct positions of advocacy, a plurality that was to have melted and melded into singular containment dubbed a 'melting pot,' called the bluff of our E pluribus unum and, in the process, unveiled the unassimilability of difference" (13-14).

(27.) For Zavarzadeh and Morton, the proponents of the dominant cultural studies include the likes of John Fiske and Constance Penley.

(28.) I would point out here that Hall tends to be much more reticent about real (radical?) change, almost as if to suggest something to the sort that, if it happens fine, if not, oh well. Hall, in fact, seems to limit his vision of change to the academy: "It is the sort of necessary irritant in the shell of academic life that one hopes will ... produce new pearls of wisdom" (11).

(29.) I have in mind the case of the bicultural and bilingual writer. With specific regard to the Italian/American experience, see Valesio's working paradigm in his substantive essay, "The Writer Between Two Worlds; and my review essay, "From Simulazione di reato to Round Trip: The Poetry of Luigi Fontanella," which is an abbreviated version of my later essay "Italian/American Writer or Italian Poet Abroad?: Luigi Fontanella's Poetic Voyage." In the analogous case of the Cuban American, Perez Firmat offers a cogent exegesis of the bilingual writer who, in adopting both languages (at times separately, at other times together in the same text), occupies what he considers the "space between" (21).

(30.) See Ahmad's response. My discussion here of Ahmad and of a re-definition of the Italian/American writer, constitute shortened versions of what already appeared in my essay, "In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer."

(31.) I use the adjective other, here, in this essay, as an umbrella term to indicate that which either has not yet been canonized, considered a valid category, by the dominant culture (here, read, for instance, MLA) or, if already accepted, has been so in a seemingly conditional and a somewhat sporadic manner, namely, when it is a matter of convenience on the part of the dominant culture.

(32.) For an excellent example of this notion put into effect, see Gunew.

Works Cited

Aaron, Daniel. "The Hyphenate Writer and American Letters." Smith Alumni Quarterly 55.2 (1964): 213-17; now revised in Rivista di studi angloamericani 3.4-5 (1984-85): 11-28.

Ahmad, Aijaz. "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory.'" Social Text 17 (1987): 3-27.

Aleandri, Emelise and Maxine Schwartz Seller, "Italian American Theater." Ethnic Theater in the United States. Ed. M. Schwartz Seller. Westport CT: Greenwood P, 1983. 237-76.

Aleandri, Emelise. A History of Italian American Theater: 1900-1905. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1984.

Barolini, Helen. The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women. 1985. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000.

--. Festa: Recipes and Recollections of Italian Holidays. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988.

Basile Green, Rose. The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction between Two Cultures. Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1974.

Belluscio, Steven. "Sixty Years of Breaking Silences: A Brief History of Italian/ American Literary Criticism." Italian Americans: A Retrospective on the Twentieth Century. Selected Essays from the 32nd Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association. Ed. Paola A. Sensi-Isolani and Anthony Julian Tamburri. Staten Island NY: AIHA, 2001. 241-67.

Betsy's Wedding. Dir. Alan Alda. Screenplay by Alan Alda. Disney. 1990.

Bevilacqua, Piero, Andreina De Clementi, and Emilio Franzina, ed. Storia dell'emigrazione italiana: arrivi. Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2002.

Bona, Mary Jo. Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999.

Cagidemetrio, Alide. Introduction. Peppino. By Luigi Ventura. The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations. Eds. Werner Sollors and Marc Shell. New York: New York UP, 2000. 214-69.

Camaiti Hostert, Anna, and Anthony Julian Tamburri, ed. Scene italoamericane: rappresentazioni cinematografiche degli italiani d'America. Rome: Luca Sossella Editore, 2002.

Casella, Paola. Hollywood Italian: gli italiani nell'America di celluloide. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1998.

D'Acierno, Pellegrino, ed. The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts. New York: Garland, 1999.

Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon P, 1978.

Del Guidice, Luisa, ed. Studies in Italian American Folklore. Logan UT: Utah State UP, 1993.

DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Viking, 1997.

Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Franzina, Emilio. Dall'Arcadia in America: attivita letteraria ed emigrazione transoceanica in Italia (1850-1940). Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione. Giovanni Agnelli, 1996.

Gardaphe, Fred L. "In Need of Revision." Fra Noi (July 2001): 91.

--. Italian Signs, American Streets. The Evolution of Italian American Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

--. Preface. Studies on Italian-American Literature. By Franco Mulas. Staten Island: CMS, 1995. vii-viii.

Gioia, Dana. "Response to Robert Viscusi." Italian Americana 12.2 (1994): 273-77.

Giunta, Edvige. Writing with An Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

The Godfather. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo. Paramount. 1972.

Goodfellas. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi. Warner. 1990.

Gunew, Sneja. "Denaturalizing Cultural Nationalisms: Multicultural Readings of 'Australia.'" Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 99-112.

Hall, Stuart. "Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies." Rethinking Marxism 5.1 (1992): 10-18.

Hendin, Josephine Gattuso. "The New World of Italian American Studies." American Literary History 13.1 (2001): 141-57.

Italianamerican. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Screenplay Lawrence D. Cohen and Mardik Martin. Janus. 1974.

Jameson, Frederic. "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital." Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88.

Kadir, Djelal. "Introduction: America and Its Studies." America: The Idea, the Literature. Special issue of PMLA 118.1 (2003): 9-24.

Leonard, George J. "Making a Point of It." The Italian American Heritage. A Companion to Literature and Arts. Ed. Pellegrino D'Acierno. New York: Garland, 1999. xv-xxii.

Maffi, Mario. "The Strange Case of Luigi Donato Ventura's Peppino: Some Speculations on the Beginnings of Italian-American Fiction." Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, & the Languages of American Literature. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York; NYUP, 1998. 166-75.

Mannino, Mary Ann, Revisionary Identities: Strategies of Empowerment in the Writing of Italian/American Women. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

Marchand, Jean-Jacques, ed. La letteratura dell'emigrazione: gli scrittori di lingua italiana nel mondo. Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1991.

Martellone, Anna Maria. "The Formulation of an Italian-American Identity through Popular Theater." Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, & the Languages of American Literature. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: NYUP, 1998.205-09.

Mulas, Francesco. Studies on Italian-American Literature. Staten Island NY: Center for Migration Studies, 1992.

The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations. Ed. Werner Sollors and Marc Shell. New York: New York UP, 2000. 214-69.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Principles of Philosophy. Collected Papers. Ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Vols. I and II. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960. 171, 292-93.

Peragallo Olga. Italian-American Authors and Their Contribution to American Literature. New York: S.F. Vanni, 1949.

Perez Firmat, Gustavo. "Spic Chic: Spanglish as Equipment for Living." The Caribbean Review 15.3 (1987): 20+.

Pipino, Mary Francis, "I have found my voice": The Italian-American Woman Writer. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

Romano, Rose, ed., la bella figura: a choice. San Francisco: malafemmina press, 1993.

Romeo, Caterina. "Nella letteratura italo americana." Ed. Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi, and Emilio Franzina. Storia dell' emigrazione italiana: arrivi. Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2002. 632-60.

--. Tradizione e innovazione nei memoir delle scrittrici italo americane. Rome: Bulzoni, forthcoming.

Rotella, Mark. "Beyond the Shadow of the Mob." Publishers Weekly. http://publishersweekly.reviewsnews.com. October 14, 2002.

Scambray, Kenneth. The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in American and Canada. Toronto: Guernica, 2000.

Sollors, Werner, ed. Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature. New York: NYUP, 1998. Talese, Gay. Honor Thy Father. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

--. Unto The Sons. New York: Knopf, 1993.

--. "Where Are The Italian-American Novelists?" The New York Times Book Review (March 14, 1993): 1+.

Tamburri, Anthony Julian. "In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer: Definitions and Categories." Differentia, review of italian thought 6 & 7 (Spring/Autumn 1994): 9-32.

--. "Italian/American Cultural Studies--An Emergence[y]?" Italian Americans and the Media. Eds. Mary Jo Bona and Anthony Julian Tamburri. Staten Island: AIHA, 1996. 305-24.

--. "Italian/American Literary Discourse: Two Recent Contributions." Forum Italicum 30.2 (1996): 423-32.

--. Italian/American Short Films & Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading. West Lafayette IN: Purdue UP, 2002.

--. "Italian/American Writer or Italian Poet Abroad?: Luigi Fontanella's Poetic Voyage." Canadian Journal of Italian Studies 18 (1996): 76-92.

--. Review, The Italian American Heritage. The Italian American Review 7.2 (2000): 163-69.

--. A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer. Albany NY: SUNY Press, 1998.

--. From Simulazione di reato to Round Trip: The Poetry of Luigi Fontanella." Voices in Italian Americana 3.2 (1992): 125-34.

--. To Hyphenate or Not To Hyphenate? The Italian/American Writer: An Other American. Montreal: Guernica, 1991.

--. "Umbertina: The Italian/American Woman's Experience." From The Margin: Writings in Italian Americana. Ed. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphe. West Lafayette IN: Purdue UP, 1991. 357-73.

Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Paolo A. Giordano, & Fred L. Gardaphe, ed. From the Margin. Writings in Italian Americana. Rev. ed. West Lafayette IN: Purdue UP, 2000.

True Love. Dir. Nancy Savoca. Screenplay by Nancy Savoca and Richard Guay. MGM. 1989.

Valesio, Paolo. "The Writer Between Two Worlds: The Italian Writer in the United States." Differentia 3 & 4 (Spring/Autumn 1989): 259-76.

Viscusi, Robert. "Breaking the Silence: Strategic Imperatives for Italian American Culture." Voices in Italian Americana 1.1 (1990): 1-13.

--. "De vulgari eloquentia: An Approach to the Language of Italian American Fiction." Yale Italian Studies 1.3 (1981): 21-38.

--. "Where Are the Italian American Novelists? A Special Forum." Italian Americana 12.1 (1993): 7-37.

--. "Where to Find Italian American Literature." Italian Americana 12.2 (1994): 267-72.

Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud and Donald Morton. Theory, (Post)Modernity, Opposition: An "Other" Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Washington DC: Maisonneuve P, 1991.

Anthony Julian Tamburri is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Languages and Linguistics at Florida Atlantic University. He has published widely on Italian and Italian/American Studies. His most recent publications include Semiotics of Re-Reading: Guido Gozzano, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Italo Calvino (Fairleigh Dickinson UP 2003), available also in Italian as Una semiotica della rileetura: Guido Gozzano, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Italo Calvino (Franco Cesati Editore 2003). He has also published To Hyphenate or not to Hyphenate (1991); A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer (1998); and Italian/American Short Films & Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading (2002). He is the president of the American Italian Historical Association.