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From Saturday Night Fever to Jersey Shore , Italian American youth in New York City have appropriated-and been appropriated by-popular American culture. Here, Donald Tricarico investigates how Italian ethnicity has been used to fashion Guido as a distinct youth style that signals inclusion in popular American culture and, simultaneously, the making of a new ethnic subject. Emerging from a wave of Italian immigration after World War II in outer borough neighborhoods such as Bensonhurst, the story of the Guido is an Italian American story, symbolizing the negotiation of a negatively privileged ethnicity within American society. Tricarico takes up questions about the definition of Guido, the role of disco, and the identity politics of Jersey Shore in order to reconsider the significance of Guido for the study of Italian American ethnicity.
List of contents
1. Theorizing Italian American Youth Culture.- 2. A Local Italian American Youth Style Tradition: Anticipating Guido.- 3. The Turn to Disco and Other Subcultural Developments.- 4. Becoming Guido: Identifying a Youth Subculture.- 5. Performing Style.- 6. "It's Cool Being Italian": Fashioning an Ethnic Youth Style.- 7. The Local Struggle for Cool.- 8. GUIDOVILLE: Labeling Italian Americans Deviant.- 9. A Party Culture Becomes a Media Spectacle.- 10. Rethinking Italian American Ethnicity: A Middle Space.
About the author
Donald Tricarico is Professor of Sociology at Queensborough Community College, CUNY, where he has taught since 1977.
Summary
From Saturday Night Fever to Jersey Shore, Italian American youth in New York City have appropriated—and been appropriated by—popular American culture. Here, Donald Tricarico investigates how Italian ethnicity has been used to fashion Guido as a distinct youth style that signals inclusion in popular American culture and, simultaneously, the making of a new ethnic subject. Emerging from a wave of Italian immigration after World War II in outer borough neighborhoods such as Bensonhurst, the story of the Guido is an Italian American story, symbolizing the negotiation of a negatively privileged ethnicity within American society. Tricarico takes up questions about the definition of Guido, the role of disco, and the identity politics of Jersey Shore in order to reconsider the significance of Guido for the study of Italian American ethnicity.
Additional text
“This book is highly multidisciplinary, understandably, given its multiple vistas. … It explicates the vibrancy and a value that a generation crafted out of on word, Guido, devised to suggest the opposite.” (Nicholas Boston, Italian American Review, Vol. 10 (2), 2020)
Report
"This book is highly multidisciplinary, understandably, given its multiple vistas. ... It explicates the vibrancy and a value that a generation crafted out of on word, Guido, devised to suggest the opposite." (Nicholas Boston, Italian American Review, Vol. 10 (2), 2020)
