The Italian American Table

Food, Family, and Community in New York City

Bibliographic Data

ID20004059
AuthorsSimone Cinotto (0000-0003-3519-5437, corresponding author)
Year2013
Pages312
Publication date2013-11-15
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueItalian American Table (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherUniversity of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5406/illinois/9780252037733.001.0001
OpenAlexW4255035269
Open LibraryOL28515231M
ISBN9780252037733
LanguageEN
Citations received27

Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, this book 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, the book 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. For generations of Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Calabrese immigrants in New York, Italian American cuisine was much more than a remnant of the home country; the book shows how the Italian American table we now celebrate emerged as the outcome of years of selective incorporations of cultural fragments, resources, and meanings available to the immigrant community. Adding a transnational dimension to the study of Italian American foodways, the book recasts Italian American food culture as an American “invention” resonant with traces of tradition

Aesthetics · Art · Ethnic group · Foodways · Identity (music) · Immigration · Political science · Power (physics) · Sociology · Sustenance · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · 20th century · Cooking, italian · Ethnic identity · Food · Food and drink · Food habits · Italian American families · Italian americans · New York · New York (State) · Social aspects · Social life and customs · ukslc

Tools

Open DOILibgen