Italian-Americans' Contested Whiteness in Early Cinematic Melodrama

In the contemporary race studies debate, the concept of ‘whiteness’ has acquired a central role. The historical process through which the Italian-American community became ‘white’ is a relevant case study for showing the constructedness of such category, and the power relations implied in it. This paper focuses on the role played by early cinematic melodrama, in the light of wider social and political transformations that led to the assimilation of Italian immigrants into American racial discourse. In early twentieth-century United States, mass immigration and the institutionalization of cinema were two interrelated phenomena. Cinema became a ‘respectable’ medium by assigning itself a moral and didactic role. To attend film screenings would be, for millions of immigrants, a way to become ‘Americanized’. In the same period wider socio-political discourses contributed to the re-signification of ‘whiteness’ in American society. In order to accommodate both the need of cheap immigrant labour and nativist ideologies concerned with the purity of the ‘white’ (e.g. Anglo-American) core of society, ‘whiteness’ became fragmented into an array of racially inflected ‘national types’. Among them, Italian-Americans were provided with ‘probationary whiteness’, but nevertheless were still deemed as racially inferior and ‘unfit for self-government’. In portraying Italian-Americans, US cinema deployed melodramatic narratives to negotiate their ‘white’ status through the polarized moral discourse that characterized this particular genre. It is possible to trace different stylistic paradigms of early American cinema by comparing several melodramas directed by D.W. Griffith, portraying Italian-American characters, and later movies, such as Reginald Barker's The Italian (1915). The shift from early modes of representations (with a prevalence of sensational ‘attractions’) to the emergence of a classical narrative paradigm corresponds to a different status of Italian-American subjectivities. In earlier films, the Italian protagonist is an undefined member of a marginalized group, an anonymous subject marked as ‘other’ in relation to Anglo-American society. Later on, the Italian protagonist becomes a fully-rounded character through the use of cinematic devices, such as point-of-view shots and subtler acting, and it becomes possible to gain access to his subjectivity. The representation of Italian-Americans as ‘others’ in cinematic melodrama, and their subsequent assimilation into dominant racial ideology, reveals the variable and complex meanings of the social category of whiteness.