Description
Book SynopsisExamining films, literature, songs, and photographs with an emphasis on a feminist materialist interpretation, Producing Culture considers the representations of different kinds of labor historically performed by women in Italy and the U.S. in order to reassess dominant narratives about the history of Italy and of Italians in the United States.
Trade ReviewRuberto moves labor cultural history to a new level by exploring and connecting diverse areas previously ignored or understudied. Theoretically grounded in the work of Antonio Gramsci, this study revises earlier applications of his theories to gender and work to create a unique and rewarding challenge to earlier, limited views of Italian and Italian American women's work. Ruberto's range of study and precision of analysis forces serious reconsideration of the roles women played in the Italian migration experience. There is a powerful freshness here that will no doubt spark new discussion in Italian and Italian Americans studies. -- Fred Gardaphe, Director of the Italian American Studies Program, Stony Brook University
Much like Gramsci in his notebooks, Laura Ruberto offers readings of diverse and complex networks of cultural products. Ruberto clearly, effectively, and engagingly threads "women's work" through expressive sites such as rice paddies, writing, film, and factories. Embroidering a context of activism and social change across continents, Ruberto's own work proposes further new ways of being Gramscian. -- Pasquale Verdicchio, Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, University of California, San Diego
Table of ContentsChapter 1 Italian Rice Workers and National Popular Culture Chapter 2 Migrant Domestic Labor and the Creation of Identity Chapter 3 Work and the Italian American Home in Cinema Chapter 4 "All Colors, All Religions, All United": Women Workers in California's Canneries
