available from SUNY Press

Fifties Ethnicities brings together a variety of texts to explore what it meant to be American in the middle of “America's Century.” In a series of comparative readings that draws on novels, television programs, movie magazines, and films, Floreani crosses generic boundaries to show how literature and mass media worked to mold concepts of ethnicity in the 1950s. Revisiting well-known novels of the period, such as Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, as well as less-studied works, such as William Saroyan's Rock Wagram and C. Y. Lee's The Flower Drum Song (the original source of the more famous Rodgers and Hammerstein musical), Floreani investigates how the writing of ethnic identity called into question the ways in which signifiers of Americanness also inherently privileged whiteness. By putting these novels into conversation with popular media narratives such as I Love Lucy, the author offers an in-depth examination of the boundaries and possibilities for participating in American culture in an era that greatly influenced national ideas about identity. While midcentury mass media presented an undeniably engaging vision of American success, national belonging, and guidelines for cultural citizenship, Floreani argues that ethnic writers and artists were, at the same time, engaging that vision and implicitly participating in its construction.

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“Tracy Floreani is a highly attentive reader of film and television as well as literature, and her extensive grounding in the criticism of her texts gives her analyses particular depth.”
- The Journal of American History

“Floreani's pairing of commercial and literary narratives is [. . .] an effective way to examine the period, providing a greater understanding of not only post-war literature but also the increasing interaction between literature and mass media in the twentieth century.” - MELUS

“Floreani seeks to assess the past more honestly by deconstructing the mass media erasure of ethnic difference and reconstructing its alternative figurations in literary forms.”
- American Literary History