Italian American Sociology

During my semester abroad at Portsmouth University, I enrolled in a course called Arts & Society. This course was chosen as it was the closest equivalent to a Cultural Studies course; it focused on studying the arts through a sociological lens. In the unit, the term art was employed in its widest definition. It not only focused on the fine arts, such as opera, painting and theater, but also on what commonly is considered the popular culture: film, television series and popular music. The aim of the unit was to give an overview of the sociology of the arts and explore the relationship that exists between society and the arts. It aimed to give the student the tools to investigate works of art in many different ways. I will mention only a few

This characterization is clearly reflecting a very small part of Italian American community, since it consists of some 20 million people in the U.S. There is some truth to the portrayal, since organized crime from Italians/Italian Americans has probably been the ‘leading’ criminal organization in the U.S for half a decade; however, less than 1 % of the Italian Americans are involved in these types of activities. What I found in my study was that this characterization has its origins in the very common racism or fear of the unknown, i.e. immigrants that existed against the new immigrants that came to America in the beginning of the 20th century. This was probably one of the more interesting things I learned studying this topic. The bias, and sometimes outright racism, towards the newly arrived Italians was something that affected most. In the beginning of the 20th century, racism against people who were of another skin colour than black was prevalent; being white meant being able to take part in society as an equal and benefit from many advantages in general. In American society in this time, Italians were not considered to be white by the general population, even if they legally were labelled as caucasian (Guglielmo, 2012, p.7). This fact is important because it tells us something about why Italian Americans have generally been portrayed in this way. The negative stereotype of Italian Americans has since changed and been appropriated by Italian Americans themselves: This has lead to more multifaceted portrayals of Italian Americans, although often still of the same genre today as they were in the