Guido Culture and Italian American Youth: From Bensonhurst to Jersey Shore

by Donald Tricarico

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030032937
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	12/24/2018
Series:	Italian and Italian American Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Donald Tricarico is Professor of Sociology at Queensborough Community College, CUNY, where he has taught since 1977. 

Table 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.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A brilliant work of close knowledge, deep study, patient and clear application of social science methods, and wonderful reflections on class, ethnicity, and culture within the US racial order. Without romanticizing, Tricarico shows an Italian American culture able to create and recreate style in shifting urban settings.” (David Roediger, Foundation Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas, USA, and author of Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White)

Editorial Reviews

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)

From the Publisher