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

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