Delivered at Italian American Studies Association Conference, 26th – 28th October 2023, University of Arkansas.

In a helpful abbreviation of a hugely complex topic, Story and Walker describe the formation of diasporic identity as a series of claimed commonalities which ‘both provide for internal cohesion and mark [a community] off from others’. While factors such as lineage have strictly delineated members of the Irish-American and Italian-American communities throughout their shared history, however, their shared Roman Catholic faith and historical positioning as ethnic outsiders within American society have presented a range of narrative possibilities to writers.

Although his ‘name is different and he certainly doesn’t look Italian’, as outsider Kay Adams observes, the Irish-German orphan Tom Hagen occupies an important position within the Corleone family. While his ethnicity may bar him from progressing further in organised crime, it does not stop his inclusion within the family – and may indeed play a part in allowing him to be a closer brother to Sonny than his own blood relatives. The films of Martin Scorsese also feature several prominent close relationships between Irish-American and Italian-American characters, perhaps most strikingly The Irishman’s shared bedroom scene.

Positioned as both an ‘inside-outsider’ and an ‘outside-insider’ by virtue of their shared and differing characteristics, the Irish-American figure in the crime narrative performs the function of introducing the audience to a secretive world, yet denying their inclusion within it. This same dual status, however, allows them to form strong homosocial relationships, intimate fraternal bonds that their Italian-American counterparts are not shown to form with members of their own hyper-masculine circle.