Reading (Italian American) Material Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo

Year 2023, Issue: 60, 121 - 137, 31.12.2023

Giuseppe Capalbo

Abstract

This paper proposes a reading of Louise DeSalvo’s work from
a material culture perspective. In the first place, I consider how women
were conceived of as objects in Italian American families, by looking at
DeSalvo’s memoir writing; specifically, in Vertigo (1996) and Chasing
Ghosts: A M emoir o f a Father, Gone to Work (2016). In the second
place, informed by DeSalvo’s theoretical writing (Writing as a Way
o f Healing, 1999), I will address what I term the material texture of
her writing, that is to say, the ability to involve - and take inspiration
from - material things in the process of writing. Lastly, following
Irina D. Mihalache and Elizabeth Zanoni, I will draw on the idea
of f o o d ’s materialities (4) - and their three interrelated facets (food,
environments, and representations) - to investigate how DeSalvo -
as a third-generation Italian American woman - tackled questions of
food preparation and consumption in Crazy in the Kitchen (2004). In
this fashion, the article complements the work on the interrelationship
between materiality and identity, by offering an alternative reading of
its diverse textual representations

Keywords

hasing Ghosts, Crazy in the Kitchen, Louise DeSalvo, material culture, memoir writing, Vertigo

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