Ryan Calabretta-Sajder Co-Edits New Volume Examining Race, Mobility and Representation in Green Book

Ryan Calabretta-Sajder, the inaugural Professor Antonio Marinoni and Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni Endowed Chair and associate professor of Italian and director of International and Global Studies at the U of A, has co-edited a new scholarly volume, Reading the Green Book: Race, Mobility, and the Politics of Representation.

The 231-page collection, co-edited with M. Marina Melita, senior lecturer of Italian and coordinator of Italian Studies at Marist University and President of the AATI, offers a sustained critical look at Peter Farrelly's 2018 film Green Book. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture and prompted wide public debate. It tells the story of Tony "Lip" Vallelonga, a working-class Italian American from the Bronx, who is hired to drive the Black classical pianist Don Shirley on a concert tour through the segregated Deep South in 1962. Its title comes from The Negro Motorist Green Book, the travel guide Black Americans relied on to find safe lodging, food and services during the Jim Crow era.

The contributors approach the film from film and media studies, Italian American studies, African American studies, gender and sexuality studies, and pedagogy. Together, the essays ask how the film represents race, ethnicity, class, masculinity and the open road. They also examine what the film reveals, and what it obscures, about Black mobility under segregation and about the place of Italian Americans in the history of American whiteness.

"Green Book was embraced by many audiences and sharply criticized by others, and that tension is exactly why it deserves careful scholarly attention," Calabretta-Sajder said. "This volume doesn't set out to simply celebrate or condemn the film. It asks readers to think critically about who gets to tell stories of race and travel in America, how Italian American and African American histories intersect on screen, and what these representations teach us about the nation's past and present."

In addition to co-writing the volume's introduction with Melita, Calabretta-Sajder contributed a chapter titled "Queering Peter Farrelly's Green Book: Place, Space, Travel." The chapter examines how the film stages space, the road and the relationship between its two protagonists, including its portrayal of Shirley's gender identity.

The volume grew out of years of collaboration, beginning during Covid with a roundtable sponsored by Diversity, Transformation & Italian Studies, and later including a panel the editors organized at the 2025 American Association of Teachers of Italian conference at Princeton University. It is designed for both researchers and teachers, and offers approaches for bringing the film and its histories into the university classroom.

Calabretta-Sajder and Melita will present the book at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at CUNY in New York on Oct. 13.

Reading the Green Book is Calabretta-Sajder's sixth edited or co-edited book. It follows Italian Americans on the Page: Revisiting the Classics and Exploring New Voices (SUNY Press, 2025) and Italian Americans on Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future (Lexington Books, 2021). He holds the inaugural Professor Antonio Marinoni and Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni Endowed Chair in Italian in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. In 2025, Sergio Mattarella, president of the Italian Republic, conferred on him motu proprio the rank of Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella d'Italia.

About the Italian Program: The University of Arkansas offers the only collegiate Italian program in Arkansas. It launched an Italian major in 2023 and is part of the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.