Mis-Representing Italian Americans in the U.S. media – faked identities and dignitary harm

This study aims to gain a comprehensive perspective on the role of media and virtual representations in the construction of the Italian American identity and to highlight how deeply this prejudicial vision, based on uninspected assumptions, is rooted in today’s US socio-cultural landscape. Recent polls revealed that, on average, more than 70% of Americans associate Italian Americans with either criminal activities or blue-collar work. Such perceptions, however, are disconfirmed by official data which demonstrate that only a very small percentage of the 26 million Americans of Italian descent –the fifth largest ethnic grouping in the States – is involved in organized crime, whereas two-thirds of the Italian Americans are in white-collar jobs as executives, physicians, teachers, attorneys etc. That notwithstanding, in the world of the U.S. media, Americans of Italian heritage are represented through conventional Mafia-themed scenarios. Quality print media and Italian Anti-Defamation leagues have investigated and protested against such popular culture’s obsession with the Italian Mafia. Films like The Godfather and Goodfellas have ‘promoted’ the widespread persuasion that every Italian-American must have some “mob” connection. Not to mention the recent success of the TV series The Sopranos, which has done much to confirm such assumption, thus creating an unjustified cultural boundary between insiders and outsiders of the national community. In the field of advertising the mob stereotype has recently popped up with more frequency, selling everything from beer to pancakes, from ragu to hamburgers, and cars. In a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis perspective (Prior & Hengst 2010; Kress & van Leeuwen 2001, 2006; Iedema 2003), we analyzed a corpus of 120 commercials (a small qualitative sample will be shown and commented on in our presentation) and isolated ‘traits’ that significantly construe and depict these stereotyped identities. Common components are Italian-American accent/ Southern Italian dialect (with subtitles), silence, innuendo, music, costumes and re-semiotised quotations from mob films, all sketching out ‘narrowed’, comic, and even grotesque identities. This greatly contributes to make being an Italian-American a deceptively difficult legacy, although organized crime represents a miniscule fraction of Italian-Americans (Laurino 2000). Further pragmatically oriented research is thus needed to pre-empt the further spreading of such communication-impeding and dignity-harming clichés.