Italian Culture As White Culture in Postwar United States

Abstract

Italian-Americans and recent immigrants to the US saw rapidly shifting political and social environment in the decade after the Second World War. Though legally white, Italian Americans did not fully benefit from the racialized systems in the US. Yet, the art and culture from their country of origin/ancestry was being used by the US in their Cultural Cold War to represent white ‘Western’ culture, which was set in opposition to Communist ‘Eastern’ culture in the USSR. Exhibitions like MoMA’s Twentieth Century Italian Art and Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today not only opened markets in the US for Italian material culture but also helped establish a cultural link between the US and Italy’s humanist past. This work had begun before the war with various exhibitions of Italian Renaissance art. The postwar shift to supporting modern art and design was important to solidifying America’s position as the ‘Western’ cultural leader.

Marshall Plan funds were being used in small and large ways to fund exhibitions of Italian art and design in the US immediately following the Second World War. These exhibitions were not neutral presentations of Italian material culture. Rather, they presented Italy and its culture as part of the capitalist democracies of the racialized-white ‘West’. This, as Said outlined, necessitates a ‘Eastern’ other who was non-white. Though Italian Americans continued to be only liminally white, Italian art and design was solidified as part of white ‘Western’ culture. Studies of the use of exhibitions in the postwar period have already highlighted the way political actors shifted the way art was contextualized by both cultural elites and the general public—from Serge Guillbaut’s early work to more recent books by Nancy Jachec. Raffaele Bedarida’s recent book also helped contextualized the longer ebb and flow of Italian art in US high and popular culture. Adding to these dialogues, in this paper, I will elaborate on how the post-war exhibitions of Italian art and design in the US served to further early American Cold War ideas about whiteness and culture.