Italian American Review SummeR 2013 • Volume 3 • NumbeR 2 Italian American Review John D. Calandra Italian American Institute The Italian American Review (IAR), a bi-annual, peer-reviewed journal of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, publishes scholarly articles about the history and culture of Italian Americans, as well as other aspects of the Italian diaspora. The journal embraces a wide range of professional concerns and theoretical orientations in the social sciences and in cultural studies. The full text of IAR issues from Volume 1 (2011) to the present is available online through EBSCO’s “America: History and Life” database (http://www.ebscohost.com/public/america- history-and-life). The IAR is listed in the Modern Language Association Directory of Periodicals. editorial office Editor: Joseph Sciorra, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Associate Editor: Anthony Julian Tamburri, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Associate Editor: Fred Gardaphé, Queens College, CUNY Managing Editor: Rosangela Briscese, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Assistant Editor: Siân Gibby, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Production Manager: Lisa Cicchetti, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Book Review Editor: Nancy Carnevale, Montclair State University Film and Digital Media Review Editor: Laura E. Ruberto, Berkeley City College Subscription Manager: Rachel Hoyle, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Copy Editor: Ernestine Franco, Pern Editorial Services editorial board Richard Alba, The Graduate Center, CUNY Giorgio Bertellini, University of Michigan Donna Chirico, York College, CUNY Simone Cinotto, Università degli Studi di Torino Enrico Cumbo, Michael Power/St. Joseph High School Donna Gabaccia, University of Minnesota John Gennari, University of Vermont Jennifer Guglielmo, Smith College Nicholas Harney, Cassamarca Foundation, University of Western Australia Cover photo: Sabato “Simon” Rodia’s Watts Towers (detail), Los Angeles, 2005. © Joseph Sciorra. John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Queens College, CUNY 25 West 43rd Street, 17th floor New York, NY 10036 ISSN 0535-9120 All rights reserved. Printed in the United States. © 2013 John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Italian American Review SummeR 2013 • Volume 3 • NumbeR 2 ARTICleS 99 “White Ethnicity”: A Reappraisal YIORGOS Anagnostou NoTeS AND DoCumeNTS 129 Nunzio Pernicone (1940–2013): A Remembrance Mary ANNE Trasciatti booK ReVIeWS 133 Families, Lovers, and Their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada (Sonia Cancian) DIANE C. VECCHIO 135 Hidden: Reflections on Gay Life, AIDS, and Spiritual Desire (Richard Giannone) PETER Savastano 137 Vite Italiane: Italian Lives in Western Australia (Susanna Iuliano) ILARIA VANNI 139 Undermining Race: Ethnic Identities in Arizona Copper Camps, 1880–1920 (Phylis Cancilla Martinelli) PETER VELLON 142 Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Pasquale Verdicchio) DOMINIQUE PADURANO FIlm ReVIeWS 146 Vito (Jeffrey Schwarz) Jonathan J. Cavallero 149 Le mamme di San Vito (Gianni Torres) David ALIANO 151 My Reincarnation (Jennifer Fox) GAOHENG ZHANG DIgital meDIA ReVIeW 154 Italian-American Oral History and Its Digitized Sites LUISA DEL GIUDICE exhIbITIoN ReVIeWS 166 Strangers in a Strange Land: A History of Italian-Language American Imprints, 1830–1945 (James J. Periconi, curator) FERNANDA PERRONE 168 From Italy to America (Kathleen Motes Bennewitz and Christopher Shields, curators) JOSEPH J. INGUANTI 171 Italians in the Santa Clara Valley (Ken Borelli and Nancy Morreale, curators) GLENNA Matthews 173 Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Times: Italian Canadian Experiences during World War II (Alison Kenzie, curator) I. SHELDON POSEN “White ethnicity”: A Reappraisal YIORGOS Anagnostou “White ethnicity,” a panethnic category created in the context of the modern Civil Rights era, is a dramatically dissonant phrase. Much in vogue in the academy, it neither confers an official ethnoracial status in the polity, nor does it mobilize a social movement under its banner. Copiously utilized as an analytical term in intellectual circles, it is rarely, if ever, deployed for popular self-ascription. Framed as a historical and political category, it is often unreflectively naturalized as a universal European referent. While it encompasses heterogeneous populations, it is commonly reduced to a monolithic racial entity, despite the ample use of quotation marks around the term. The inconsistency between widespread circulation in the academy and relative invisibility in the wider society is indeed striking. This disparity partly explains the blank stares in students and the public when they chance upon the term and also the bewilderment or derision this subject triggers among even progressive thinkers. How do we explain this disconnection? What is the significance of white ethnicity in contem- porary discussions about American diversity? Does white ethnicity matter and if so, how, and to whom? Naming populations, of course, carries social implications. Classifica- tions demarcate boundaries and define identity, functioning as powerful instruments of inclusion and exclusion. They normalize what lies within their center of inquiry and in turn render invisible nonnormative periph- eries and borders. They offer sites for identification, and they are powerful instruments in shaping public perception. This is why it is important to consider the above questions and reflect on the ways we think and write about “white ethnicity,” this productive and ever-shifting yet simultane- ously delimiting category. Two interrelated developments make this an urgent task. First, the dominance of the “white ethnicity” trope in academia requires that we pause and reflect on the scholarship that consolidates this category. What knowledge does it produce and to what end? It is necessary to take stock of its gains and identify its limitations. Second, scholars increasingly register unease for reductive representations in white ethnic studies; noting its normalizing function, they call for its imaginative remapping.1 A critical rethinking of white ethnicity calls for historicizing speci- ficity: the identification of the discourses, such as multiculturalism and ©2013 John D. Calandra Italian American Institute 100 • Italian American Review 3.2 • Summer 2013 the melting pot, that have contributed to its articulation, and the political, civic, and cultural sites where these discourses are legitimized or debated (education, scholarship, public culture). The investigation calls for a discus- sion of discrepancies associated with its boundaries and meaning. It asks who formulates and who resists the category and how. It probes the power relations that align with one version while they displace another. Is it time to move beyond white ethnicity, and if so, along which trajectory? This work aims to trouble academic narratives that construe white ethnicity as a thin cultural affiliation and/or bastion of racial politics against the interests of people of color.2 It approaches the category as a historical construct, which constitutes—rather than documents—the meaning of the populations it purports to describe. The concept is produced in a web of discursive sites (journalism, the academy, research centers, think tanks, political activism) and in turn circumscribes boundaries of belonging and assigns value to difference. Thus, this article does not venture to answer the question: What is white ethnicity? Instead, it undertakes a selective genealogy of the concept. Who authorizes the definition at any time of its articulation and to what end? Who contests it and on what grounds? This reconfiguration requires reflection on the interests and episte- mological assumptions in dominant representations of ethnicity. It calls for the deconstruction of its consolidated meaning. What displacements and exclusions did this hegemony entail? The aim is to show how two narratives—critical studies of whiteness and symbolic ethnicity—work dialectically to construe a single narrative of white ethnicity as a site of privilege. In this function, they diminish the range and significance of ethnic identities and produce a monolithic construction of white ethnics as ahistorical and anti-people of color. The aim of this work is to challenge this absolutism and propose alternatives. White ethnicity as a minority Identity Discussions about white ethnicity exhibit a recurrent slippage between race as a social construct and race as a reified category. On the one hand, there is explicit recognition of its boundaries as debated and, often, polemically contested. The place of the Irish or the Jews, for instance, has been invari- ably questioned; and the class position of European Americans has been a significant variable in the definition. On the other hand, white-ethnicity discourse routinely deploys “white” as a blanket identity in reference to Americans of European origin. That is, it equates Europeanness with whiteness. One finds an early example of this slippage in one of the most insightful discussions of white ethnicity, Perry L. Weed’s (1973) The White “White ethnicity”: A Reappraisal • 101 Ethnic Movement, a pioneering work particularly reflective on the construc- tiveness of ethnic collectives: “to the extent that a white American thinks and acts in terms of his European origins, to that extent he is a ‘white ethnic,’ that is the child, grandchild, great grandchild, etc.,