“Hyperethnicity” and Ethnic Scenarios in White Noise by Don DeLillo

The present article aims at analyzing the reshaping of the Italian American cultural heritage in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Drawing on the concept of hyperreality as construed by Jean Baudrillard, the notion of hyperethnicity proves to be an efficient tool for a thorough exam of the transformation of the crucial Italian American topoi — i.e, ethnic signifiers such as the conception of the family, the theme of the household, and the concept of serietà — in the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo. Analyzing the signs of italianità in novels by Don DeLillo, Fred Gardaphé hypothesizes that the writer enacts a “masquerade” of his cultural identity, encoding in this manner ethnic “traces” into his oeuvre (1996, 174); on the other hand, analyzing White Noise through the lens of hyperethnicity, we might see DeLillo as constantly re-negotiating his cultural legacy. Broadening, therefore, the perspectives traced by Gardaphé, we deduce that the “masques” depicted by DeLillo represent an artistic re-interpretation of the originals, the outcome of the post-modern transformation of classic ethnic topoi rather than the “disappearance of a distinctive Italian American subject in light of the advance of postmodernism” (23). As white light represents a combination of all colors in the color spectrum, and noise being the irregular, unfamiliar, unintelligible sounds of the other, White Noise by Don DeLillo reveals the author’s refracted perception of ethnic identity in the post-modern age.