Embroidered Stories

Interpreting Women's Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora
Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4968-0459-4
Verlag: University Press of Mississippi

Buch, Englisch, 396 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 672 g

For Italian immigrants and their descendants, needlework represents a marker of identity, a cultural touchstone as powerful as pasta and Neapolitan music. Out of the artifacts of their memory and imagination, Italian immigrants and their descendants used embroidering, sewing, knitting, and crocheting to help define who they were and who they have become. This book is an interdisciplinary collection of creative work by authors of Italian origin and academic essays. The creative works from thirty-seven contributors include memoir, poetry, and visual arts while the collection as a whole explores a multitude of experiences about and approaches to needlework and immigration from a transnational perspective, spanning the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.

At the center of the book, over thirty illustrations represent Italian immigrant women's needlework. The text reveals the many processes by which a simple object, or even the memory of that object, becomes something else through literary, visual, performance, ethnographic, or critical reimagining. While primarily concerned with interpretations of needlework rather than the needlework itself, the editors and contributors to Embroidered Stories remain mindful of its history and its associated cultural values, which Italian immigrants brought with them to the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina and passed on to their descendants.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Giunta, Edvige

Sciorra, Joseph

Über Autor(innen)

Edvige Giunta, Teaneck, New Jersey, is professor of English at New Jersey City University. She is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors and coeditor of Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, Italian American Writers on New Jersey: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose, and The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. Joseph Sciorra, Brooklyn, New York, is the associate director for academic and cultural programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College. He is editor of the journal Italian American Review and the book Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives.