This book is about Italian American women, food, identity, and our stories at the table. This mother-daughter research team explores how Italian American working-class women from Syracuse, New York use food as a symbol and vehicle which carries multiple meanings. In these narratives, food represents home, loss, and longing. Food also stands in for race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration, region, place, and space. The authors highlight how food is about family and tradition, as well as choice and change. These women's narratives reveal that food is related to celebration, love, power, and shame. As this study centers on the intergenerational transmission of culture, the authors' relationship mirrors these questions as they contend with their similar and disparate experiences and relationships with Italian American identity and food. The authors use the "recipe" as a conversational bridge to elicit narratives about identity and the self. They also encourage readers to listen closely to the stories at their own tables to consider how recipes and food are a way for us to claim who we are, who we think we are, who we want to be, and who we are not.

Best Food Book of 2014 by The Atlantic Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, Simone Cinotto recreates the bustling world of Italian life in New York City and demonstrates how food was at the center of the lives of immigrants and their children. From generational conflicts resolved around the family table to a vibrant food-based economy of ethnic producers, importers, and restaurateurs, food was essential to the creation of an Italian American identity. Italian American foods offered not only sustenance but also powerful narratives of community and difference, tradition and innovation as immigrants made their way through a city divided by class conflict, ethnic hostility, and racialized inequalities. Drawing on a vast array of resources including fascinating, rarely explored primary documents and fresh approaches in the study of consumer culture, Cinotto argues that Italian immigrants created a distinctive culture of food as a symbolic response to the needs of immigrant life, from the struggle for personal and group identity to the pursuit of social and economic power. Adding a transnational dimension to the study of Italian American foodways, Cinotto recasts Italian American food culture as an American "invention" resonant with traces of tradition.

How do immigrants and their children forge their identities in a new land—and how does the ethnic culture they create thrive in the larger society? Making Italian America brings together new scholarship on the cultural history of consumption, immigration, and ethnic marketing to explore these questions by focusing on the case of an ethnic group whose material culture and lifestyles have been central to American life: Italian Americans. As embodied in fashion, film, food, popular music, sports, and many other representations and commodities, Italian American identities have profoundly fascinated, disturbed, and influenced American and global culture. Discussing in fresh ways topics as diverse as immigrant women’s fashion, critiques of consumerism in Italian immigrant radicalism, the Italian American influence in early rock ’n’ roll, ethnic tourism in Little Italy, and Guido subculture, Making Italian America recasts Italian immigrants and their children as active consumers who, since the turn of the twentieth century, have creatively managed to articulate relations of race, gender, and class and create distinctive lifestyles out of materials the marketplace offered to them. The success of these mostly working-class people in making their everyday culture meaningful to them as well as in shaping an ethnic identity that appealed to a wider public of shoppers and spectators looms large in the political history of consumption. Making Italian America appraises how immigrants and their children redesigned the market to suit their tastes and in the process made Italian American identities a lure for millions of consumers. Fourteen essays explore Italian American history in the light of consumer culture, across more than a century-long intense movement of people, goods, money, ideas, and images between Italy and the United States—a diasporic exchange that has transformed both nations. Simone Cinotto builds an imaginative analytical framework for understanding the ways in which ethnic and racial groups have shaped their collective identities and negotiated their place in the consumers’ emporium and marketplace. Grounded in the new scholarship in transnational U.S. history and the transfer of cultural patterns, Making Italian America illuminates the crucial role that consumption has had in shaping the ethnic culture and diasporic identities of Italians in America. It also illustrates vividly why and how those same identities—incorporated in commodities, commercial leisure, and popular representations—have become the object of desire for millions of American and global consumers.

It is probably impossible to measure the far-reaching effect Italian-American women have had on community and culture. Italian women of yesterday have enriched modern life in Italy and America through their expertise in academics, arts, and humanitarian work. Today, their influence continues in an ever-increasing array of fields. Within the pages of Italian-American Women of Chicagoland, the lives of Italian-American women, past and present, come to life. Their stories have laid a foundation for generations to come. The story of Maria Agnesi is one of a child genius who changed the course of mathematics. Italian-born Frances Xavier Cabrini came to America and built health care facilities in Chicago and across the nation. She was later sainted by the Catholic Church for her work. The first woman in Italy to attend the University of Rome and receive a medical degree, Maria Montessori was prominent in finding a new way to educate children. Internationally, Montessori schools flourish to this day.

With writings that span more than thirty-five years, American Woman, Italian Style is a rich collection of essays that fleshes out the realities of today's Italian American women and explores the myriad ways they continue to add to the American experience. The status of modern Italian-American women in the United States is noteworthy: their quiet and continued growth into respected positions in the professional worlds of law and medicine surpasses the success achieved in that of the general population--so too does their educational attainment and income. Contributions include Donna Gabaccia on the oral-to-written history of cookbooks, Carol Helstosky on the Tradition of Invention, an interview with Sandra Gilbert, Paul Levitt's look at Lucy Mancini as a metaphor for the modern world, William Egelman's survey of women's work patterns, and Edvige Giunta on the importance of a selfconscious understanding of memory. There are explorations of Jewish-Italian intermarriages and interpretations of entrepreneurship in Milwaukee. Readers will find challenges to common assumptions and stereotypes, departures from normal samplings, and springboards to further research. American Woman, Italian Style: Italian Americana's Best Writings on Women offers unique insights into issues of gender and ethnicity and is a voice for the less heard and less seen side of the Italian-American experience from immigrant times to the present. Instead of seeking consensus or ideological orthodoxy, this collection brings together writers with a wide range of backgrounds, outlooks, ideas, and experiences. It is an impressive postmodern collection for interdisciplinary studies: a book and a look about being and becoming an American.

"My ancestral Italian village in America was in Waterbury Connecticut." In this sentence, Joanna Clapps Herman raises the central question of this book: To what extent can a person born outside of Italy be considered Italian? The granddaughter of Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States in the early 1900s, Herman takes a complicated and nuanced look at the question of to whom and to which culture she ultimately belongs. Sometimes the Italian part of her identity—her Italianità—feels so aboriginal as to be inchoate, inexpressible. Sometimes it finds its expression in the rhythms of daily life. Sometimes it is embraced and enhanced; at others, it feels attenuated. "If, like me," Herman writes, "you are from one of Italy's overseas colonies, at least some of this Italianità will be in your skin, bones, and heart: other pieces have to be understood, considered, called to ourselves through study, travel, reading. Some of it is just longing. How do we know which pieces are which?"

Mary Cappello, Louise DeSalvo, Sandra M. Gilbert, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Carole Maso, Agnes Rossi. These are some of the best-known Italian American writers today. They are part of a literary tradition with mid-twentieth century roots that began to develop, in earnest, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During those decades, a number of Italian American women, such as Helen Barolini, began to publish books that depicted their perspectives on life through the critical lenses of gender, class, and ethnicity. At the end of the twentieth century, this literature finally blossomed into a fully fledged cultural movement that also took into account issues of sexuality, age, illness, and familial and societal abuse. Writing with an Accent takes a look at this vibrant literary movement by discussing those first writers of the 1970s and 1980s as well as later authors. At the center of Edvige Giunta s Writing with an Accent is the literal notion of accent, the marker of linguistic and cultural difference that separates and identifies recent immigrants to the United States. In this study, an accent symbolically embodies the differences and creative strategies through which contemporary Italian American women writers engage Italian American culture in works of fiction, poetry, and memoir. Giunta also looks at the links between the literature and art, music, film, and video produced by contemporary Italian American women. The literature of the Italian American women in Writing with an Accent is shaped by the complicated connections these authors maintain with their cultural origins, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by their feminist consciousness and politicized sense of ethnic identity. Writing with an Accent celebrates and explores a group of authors who characteristically mix the joy and pain of Italian American life to paint a multifaceted picture of Italian American women and their complex place in U.S. culture.