Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge by John Gennari, and: In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen by Samuele F. S. Pardini (review) Nancy Carnevale African American Review, Volume 53, Number 1, Spring 2020, pp. 68-70 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2020.0002 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751817 [ Access provided at 16 Oct 2020 10:57 GMT from Macquarie University ] circumstances of African Americans’ individual and collective lives. In a wellresearched study that uses a trove of materials including family letters, program notes, newspaper articles, memoirs, and interviews from which she discovers over nine thousand references to the song, she reflects on the reasons for African Americans’ “collective embrace” of the song as an anthem. The book’s goal is to unearth the social and cultural history from within the song’s trajectory; the result is a finely wrought chronicle of African Americans’ past, and a meditation on their present and future. Perry’s methods and theoretical interventions distinguish May We Forever Stand from other studies of “Lift Every Voice” by scholars like Shana Redmond (2013), Keith Cartwright (2013), and Timothy Askew (2010), each of whom focus variously on the song’s diasporic, transnational, and national resonance. Perry’s focus on the song’s embodiment of black consciousness emphasizes the rituals that produce the kind of belonging necessary for racial solidarity and political organization. Intrinsic to this argument is her theorization of “black formalism,” a reference not to rules of decorum or social respectability, but rather to “ritual practices, codes of conduct, dignified ways of doing and being” (7). Such rituals flourished, she argues, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when explicit forms of racialized violence and exploitation compelled African Americans to turn inward and to rely on social and civic institutions in order to set political agendas. Perry does not neglect consideration of the ways that circumstances after the civil rights era—from social integration to rising levels of black immigration—have transformed and even diminished spaces of black formalism, even as the need for such rituals remains. “The song was not aligned with a politics, it was aligned with a people,” she argues, but by the 1980s, “the sense of linked fate that was once an integral part of the singing couldn’t be assumed” (210). Nonetheless, Perry argues, at the same time that the song’s themes of resilience, struggle, and hope speak to the spirit of a particular moment in history, they also possess an intrinsic endurance because of their broad and continued applicability. Thus, she concludes by drawing into the discussion recent examples of state-sanctioned antiblack violence (e.g., the police killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri). In doing so, she elucidates the continued need for spaces that affirm the humanity of black people: a need that “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and the black formalism with which it is entangled, fulfills. This book offers readers cogent and astute analyses of sociohistorical contexts, as well as the critical tools to understand why and how “Lift Every Voice and Sing” continues to play a role in the sonic landscape of black life, even as the boundaries and meanings of “blackness” change. John Gennari. Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2017. 296 pp. $30.00. Samuele F. S. Pardini. In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen. Hanover: Dartmouth College P, 2017. 280 pp. $40.00. Reviewed by Nancy Carnevale, Montclair State University S cholars almost always discuss African American and Italian American relations within the context of interracial/interethnic urban violence. There is good reason for this. While the murder of Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst in 1989 is 68 African American Review 53.1 (Spring 2020): 68-70 © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press and Saint Louis University likely the incident that comes instantly to mind, there is a long history of Italian American violence against African Americans. In recent years, scholars within Italian American studies have been exploring other intersections between these two groups who have historically shared spaces—from the plantations of Louisiana to the streets of Eastern and Midwestern cities, and some prewar suburbs—workingclass jobs, and even deeply rooted stereotypes. Two recent studies open the door to a wider conceptualization of the topic. Neither is intended to minimize Italian American racial violence or to romanticize relations between African Americans and Italian Americans. Rather, the authors take approaches that complicate our understandings of the connections between the two groups on the ground and in the imaginary. More ambitiously, each argues for the significance of this cross-cultural/ racial intersection for American culture and society. Both John Gennari in Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge and Samuele Pardini in In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity take a cultural studies approach, offering readings of books and films as well as of less traditional texts. Examples of the latter include the “soul kiss” performed by Clarence Clemons and Bruce Springsteen in their stage shows (Pardini) and the simultaneous rise of Italian American coaches (as well as broadcasters and marketers) along with black players in big-time college basketball since the 1980s (Gennari). Yet the authors’ specific concerns differ markedly. Gennari’s focus is on “the contact zone—the edge and the overlap—between Italian American and African American cultures” from the 1960s to the present (8), an edge, he notes, that can be “smooth” at times, and “serrated” at others (241). He locates this zone within what he terms “expressive culture,” which encompasses more than cultural production. One chapter considers not only musical connections but also the appeal of elements of Frank Sinatra’s biography and mythology to black performers and others in hip hop. (Sinatra and Count Basie grace the cover; Gennari’s first book is a history of jazz criticism.) This ultimately leads to an exploration of how even as black and Italian men have been coded as dangers to American society, black and Italian mothers have been attributed qualities that position them as nurturers to the nation. A chapter on film and other media highlights selected works of Spike Lee going beyond an analysis of representations to argue that his 1990s’ films portray a period of black cultural ascendance against a backdrop of Italian American decline. There are explorations of food, including television cooking shows and food-related performance art, and, as noted, college basketball. A concluding chapter considers black/Italian relations in that influential representation of Italian American life, The Sopranos (1999-2007), juxtaposed with two figures who embody transnational and multiracial notions of race and ethnicity—the Italian-speaking, Eritrean American artist Ficre Ghebreyesus, and Kym Ragusa, whose memoir, The Skin between Us (2006), recounts her life as the daughter of an Italian father and an African American mother. The aim of Gennari’s wide-ranging intercultural exploration is to develop a more nuanced understanding of race and ethnicity than that which social history might allow on its own (9). In the process, he identifies common “codes, styles, and aesthetics” that, he argues, constitute a “black Italian ethos” that permeates American culture (221). Gennari’s book is notable for an informal tone and lively prose that make for a particularly engaging read. He does not eschew the “I,” nor does he fear the charge of essentialism, regularly invoking his own experiences as an Italian American within the black/Italian contact zone. He notes that this writing style was a selfconscious choice that felt true to his subject if not to his academic training. It is well suited to a study that weaves together so many disparate characters and stories, even if the cost is a less tightly argued work. The temporal sweep of Pardini’s narrative is wider, as the subtitle indicates. The opening chapter features the unexpected pairing of Booker T. Washington’s REVIEWS 69 writings on his visit to southern Italy and his perceptions of southern Italian women, in particular with the figure of Fortunata Mancuso (Aurora Quattrocchi), the grandmother in Emanuele Crialese’s seminal 2006 film, Nuovomondo (The Golden Door). A key concept for Pardini is what he calls the “invisible blackness” of Italian Americans, by which he means the indeterminate racial status they held that encompassed “ways of being, and acting both publicly and in the private sphere, and cultural variety” (81). The term is a useful shorthand for what numerous scholars have described. In his chapter examining the Italian American presence in works by African American authors from the Jim Crow era, such as James Weldon Johnson, James Baldwin, and Richard Bruce Nugent, he argues that black writers used the “hybrid body” (81) of the Italian American man (i.e., a body not fully black or white) to question notions of whiteness and blackness as well as heterosexual norms. Most of the chapters focus on Italian American cultural production: Jerre Mangione’s autobiographical novel, Mount Allegro; the figure of the gangster in the novel and film versions of The Godfather, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Frank Lentricchia’s The Music of the Inferno; characters named “Maria” in the work of several Italian American authors, including John Fante, Carole Maso, and lesserknown writers, as well as the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen (whose mother is Italian). The final chapter considers a single stage performance by Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. and the Springsteen/Clemons partnership on stage and on the iconic cover of the Born to Run album. Pardini is less interested in actual relations between the two groups than in the symbolic uses each group has made of the other, specifically, African Americans’ use of Italian Americans’ uncertain racial status, and Italian American use of blackness. This attention to symbolism grounded in material exchanges, he claims, is used to uncover “other ideologies and forms of consciousness” of Italian immigrants and their children (7). Central to this alternate consciousness is an Italian American mother-centered, Mediterranean ethos characterized by sharing, community, and an embrace of working-class ethnic origins that is contrasted with a white, patriarchal American modernity that glorifies individual success defined by wealth. As this summary suggests, Pardini’s book is the more challenging read, best suited for graduate level courses. Pardini’s readings are often original and insightful although the selection of texts sometimes raises questions. His positive take on the racial politics of a single Sinatra/Davis performance even in the context of Sinatra’s well-documented belief in racial equality and his friendship with Davis, nevertheless begs for a consideration of the racially offensive “jokes” Sinatra regularly made at the expense of Davis on the stages of Las Vegas casinos (a contradiction Gennari skirts as well). Given the book’s emphasis on the figure of the Italian American mother, Pardini’s relative lack of attention to female Italian American authors is also curious. Although he attributes this in part to the realities of the publishing industry that has overwhelmingly favored male voices, recent years have seen a surge of scholarship on works by Italian American women. In addition to their contributions toward the study of African Americans and Italian Americans, both books are welcome additions to recent scholarship that pushes back against the notion of Italian American ethnicity as merely “symbolic” in the post-World War II era, an idea that is completely at odds with the experiences of many Italian Americans and the racial/ethnic groups around them. This leads to the question of perspective. These authors both self-consciously position themselves in these works as Italian American, therefore emphasizing Italian American cultural/historical perspectives. One wonders what an exploration of connections between these two groups would look like if told from a disciplinary perspective more firmly rooted within African American studies. Would such links—good, bad, or indifferent—even be considered a topic of consequence? Hopefully, these works will further such a dialogue. 70 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW