Addressing topics in the history and sociology of fashion, film, food, popular music, sports, masculinity, youth subcultures, and the politics of consumption, Making Italian America explores consumer culture in Italian American history and life, the role of consumption in the production of ethnic identities, and the commodification of cultural difference.

Cinotto Simone :

Simone Cinotto teaches history at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo, Italy. He is the author of The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City and Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California.

—Kristin Hoganson:
Through its attentiveness to Italian-American consumers and the U.S. consumption of Italianness, this collection of essays makes a compelling case for taste as a leading determinant of ethnic identity. Ranging from nineteenth-century immigration to twenty-first century popular culture, from fashion to Italian-themed restaurants, from one side of the Atlantic to the other and back across again, this volume casts ethnicity as more a matter of style than of tradition, due to its ever-changing nature. Like the very best lasagnes – layered, multi-textured, the whole a transcendent blending of the constituent parts – Making Italian America reveals how we have all come to be at least partly Italian and what this Italianness means.

—James Pasto:
Each of the essays is theoretically well informed, and they cohere remarkably well. Moreover, the emergent themes and the chronological structure give a sense of historical changes and emerging trends.

—Yiorgos Anagnostou:
This is an important volume contributing to the diachronic study of Italian American culture and identity and their intersections with symbolic and material consumption in a transnational framework. The sociological analysis advances an understanding of ethnicity beyond the ideology of easily disposable symbolic identities, opening new venues for thinking about European Americans.

—Thomas J. Ferraro:
Wherever you turn in Simone Cinotto's chock-full volume of essays, Italian-American identity is revealed as Consumer-Made, Consumer-Making, Commodity-Using, Commodity-Abusing: from fashion consciousness upon arrival to late-generation Armani mafiosi, from Valentino and Caruso to Guido-and-Guidette, and from Charles Atlas' dynamic tension to the Calipari-Izzo split in sideline schtick. The resultant history is as rigorous as it is capacious, the sociology diversely insightful and at times inspired, and the critical intelligence almost always that of hardball dagotude--that form of intellectual witness, swapped and reswapped across the Mediterranean Atlantic, at once fiercely loving and deeply suspicious. Wednesday is once again Prince Spaghetti Day, L'America!

Making Italian America is an innovative and entertaining addition to the body of Italian-American literature.

—Marilyn Halter:
This compelling and innovative volume captures the complexities of the pivotal role of consumption in the historical formation of transnational Italian American taste, positing a distinctive diasporic consumer culture that continues its importance today. Richly interdisciplinary, the collection represents an exciting new resource for scholars and students alike.

Stephen Fielding:

Making Italian America is not the first study of racial or ethnic consumption practices, but it stands out as an ambitious endeavour that extends the framework across four generations,
multiple American cities and locales, transnational networks, and a variety of consumer goods, behaviours, and styles....Making Italian America is a ground-breaking contribution to the fields of ethnic and cultural studies and a handbook for anyone seeking to understand both the Italian American experience and America’s history as consumed by one of its largest minorities.