Spatialities in Italian American Women's Literature: Beyond the Mean Streets

Spatialities in Italian American Women's Literature: Beyond the Mean Streets explores writings by a selection of Italian American women writers working at the intersection of gender and space. The focus is on the genre of the family saga because, as Pelayo Sañudo suggests, this genre can offer new insights into the transnational and the local history, culture, and geography of the Italian American community. Focusing on the streets—the mean streets of the title—and relying on the key concepts of relational places, place-making, and embodied spaces as discussed by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1992); Linda McDowell (1997, 1999); Doreen Massey (1994, 1995, 2005); and Fran Tonkiss (2005), the book investigates gendered spatial experiences to see how they can provide an indirect commentary on class, race, and gender relations. The spatial lens, according to Pelayo Sañudo, is key, because it is the “gendered organization of space that recognizes women's presence and historical, economic and social contributions” (34).The book is composed of four chapters, including an introduction that outlines primary sources and methodology; there is no concluding chapter. Because each chapter focuses on different texts and critical questions, they can also be appreciated as individual essays. Nonetheless, the chapters do finely interconnect the variety of spatial practices explored and contribute to broader understandings of the cultural representation of the Italian American community.The opening chapter, “Icons of Ethnicity,” provides a wide-ranging overview of the ways in which Italian Americans have been represented in both literature and cinema throughout the years. The author reflects on how these representations have “plagued our perception of this community” (1) and how it has been regarded. These reflections are successfully framed within a review of Italian American studies, with notable attention paid to the work of Mary Jo Bona, Fred Gardaphé, and Anthony Tamburri. In discussing her decision to consider only texts by Italian American female writers that can be considered family sagas, the author emphasizes how her choice of genre offers new insights into the Italian American experience while also allowing for a reevaluation of female literary production within it. The analysis outlined in this introductory chapter is well grounded in the work of prominent scholars, such as Doreen Massey, Linda McDowell, and Gillian Rose. Moreover, it is productively informed by the work of those scholars who have looked more specifically at the roles (and representations) of women in the Italian American community and at its cultural production, like Jennifer Guglielmo and Maddalena Tirabassi, and convincingly situates this volume within that discourse.Particularly compelling is the spatial dimension at the core of the analysis—not the Little Italy enclave, as could be expected, but the streets, those mean streets often perceived and investigated as a predominantly male domain. Pelayo Sañudo rightly stresses the need to go beyond the dichotomy of public spaces as mainly male dominated and private ones as primarily female, but she also emphasizes the importance of avoiding the assumption that the private sphere lacks political meaning. Nevertheless, while the selection of the street as a unit allows the analysis to transcend that conventional dichotomy, it also sheds light on the role of women in a public and yet limited arena, challenging the traditional perception of the Madonna. Drawing on Fran Tonkiss (2005), Pelayo Sañudo stresses that “the street is a minimal spatial unit which is not only informative of racial and gender social divisions, but also crucial in the very constitution of such boundary-making” (33). In the next three chapters Pelayo Sañudo applies her framework to an analysis of texts by six authors—Julia Savarese, Marion Benasutti, Helen Barolini, Tina De Rosa, Melania Mazzucco, and Laurie Fabiano—as each chapter investigates two texts in relation to specific facets of Italian American women's urban experience, among which related questions of gender inequalities, place-making practices, and processes of identity formation are considered.In the second chapter, the author turns to Savarese's The Weak and the Strong (1952) and Benasutti's No Steady Job for Papa (1966), drawing largely on feminist theory and intersectionality to explore the embodied relationship between female subjects and the city they inhabit. Using the figure of the “counter-flâneuse” (48) as a critical lens, Pelayo Sañudo explores the characters’ different experiences of—and differential access to—the city, showing how such experiences are profoundly linked to their gender and ethnic identities. She argues that the Italian American counter-flâneuse can indeed contribute to the challenging of dominant configurations.The practices identified and discussed in the analysis of Savarese and Benasutti's works are also highlighted in the following chapter, which directs its attention more specifically to questions of physical connection and displacement. Beginning with a reflection on the emergence in the US of white ethnic identities against the backdrop of the civil rights movement in the1970s, the author contextualizes Italian American ethnicity within this broader political discourse, focusing on the role played by literature and more specifically by Italian American women writers and their struggles to be acknowledged. The author's rich and engaging analysis of Barolini's Umbertina (1979) and De Rosa's Paper Fish (1980) explores genealogies of place and the crucial role they play in the work of identity construction, which Pelayo Sañudo warns is not only a way of manifesting meaningful connections to the past and to Italian American history, but also an expression of the future. In particular, considering the different movements Italian Americans experienced (migration from Italy first and then the abandoning of different Little Italies in the second half of the twentieth century), the author recognizes how place is “akin to a cultural ancestor and is equally entangled in the production of difference” (112). It is through place-making practices that the protagonists of these novels can create new forms of spatial belonging “in the culture as well as in the literary imagination” (97).The final chapter explores Mazzucco's Vita (2003) and Fabiano's Elizabeth Street (2006). Considering the importance of history and research in these authors’ works, Pelayo Sañudo offers a compelling discussion of the intersections between history and writing and the role of photographs in understanding and creating one's family history. As in the previous chapter, a wealth of diverse theoretical and cultural references is successfully brought into dialogue, allowing the author to lucidly explore literary manifestations of a gendered and racialized city. While gender, racial, and class divisions prevail in such manifestations, the author illustrates how characters from these texts find ways to react against such divisions.Spatialities in Italian American Women's Literature: Beyond the Mean Streets is a richly developed book that, through the lens of the family saga, explores the work of Italian American female writers at the intersection of gender and place. It is an enjoyable read, helpful for scholars in Italian and Italian American studies, cultural studies, and gender studies, but also for any students who confront themselves with the examination of the cultural representations of the Italian American community.