National identities in the media: Italian-American stereotypes in U.S. advertising

National identities are not a clear-cut and a once-and-for-all affair: individuals can assume collective identities, also represented by their shared metaphors and images, which can change over time or come into conflict with one another. In the world of the media, ‘imagined’ communities are mainly identified on the basis of symbols and clichés that influence peoples’ way of thinking more than is usually thought. Especially in advertising contexts, such communities are frequently represented through conventional and anachronistic behavioural models, such as the ethnocentric sense of family, fixation on food, and mafia, so far as Italy is concerned. These ‘etiquettes’ – valid both for those who rely on them and for those whom they serve to characterize – may increase emotional identification, thus contributing to the creation of cultural boundaries between Us and Others, between insiders and outsiders of one’s specific national community. Referring to Gerbner’s cultivation theory, which maintains that media are responsible for shaping or ‘cultivating’ viewers’ conceptions of social reality, we can say that in ads the perceptual expectations of the audience seem to be not only met, but reinforced, according to the requirements of the advertised goods. The need for simplification and diffusion can also play a significant role in stereotyping and can result in unbalanced portrayals and in knowledge asymmetries to be considered in the Foucauldian perspective of the all pervading power/knowledge correlation. By analyzing a corpus of 100 ads, we intend to show how distant real societal groups can be from the ‘advertised’ communities, with a major focus on the difference between the frozen image of people of Italian heritage in the US and their actual life styles and identities