Gangsters,<i>Fessos</i>, Tricksters, and Sopranos: The Historical Roots of Italian American Stereotype Anxiety

Cavallero, Jonathan J.; Plasketes, George

doi:10.3200/jpft.32.2.49-73

Cited by 16 publications

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“…The complexity of The Bear 's storytelling fabric, with its unconventional use of Italian American characters and stereotypes, adds to the urge to elaborate a new politics of Italian American representation in contemporary various media. This involves not only a renewed academic approach – which is essential – but also a reconsideration of the role of cultural associations, so far obsessively focused on mafia and gangster images, as Jonathan Cavallero remarks: ‘In recent years, groups such as the American Italian Defense Association and the National Italian American Foundation have protested the depiction of Italians in the HBO television series The Sopranos (1999–2007) while ignoring contemporary presentations of Italian ethnicity’ (Cavallero, 2004: 50–51). The engagement should also involve the viewers in case of misrepresentations:Audiences can also be empowered to take partial responsibility for the process of representation if they perceive film viewing as a dialogic, interactive process.…”

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The Bear: New (stereotypical) representations of Italian Americans in contemporary television series

Grazia Serra

2024

Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

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This article investigates the representations of Italian Americans in the successful TV series The Bear (2022–), following Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and Alan J Gravano's innovative critical framework according to which the field of Italian American cinema, TV and media studies needs to go beyond the strict notion of ethnicity and be, instead, reconsidered as an intersectional area including issues as class, gender, sexuality, power and production. The Bear portrays Carmen (‘Carmy’) Berzatto, a young top chef who returns to his hometown of Chicago to take over his family's Italian sandwich shop and who is living through an emotional breakdown because of his brother's death. The series received great praise for its ground-breaking narration style and nonconformist characters. Still, while the narrative arc of the series does not focus on the Italian roots of the protagonist and his family, many of the climatic moments recurrently exploit the commonplace repertoire of Italian American type: loud, quickly bursting into fits of rage, family obsessed, food enthusiast, somehow involved in dirty business. This analysis will explore how, in this contemporary depiction of Italian Americans, the author paradoxically departs and at the same time relies on the stereotypical dominant cliche usually employed for these characters. As a result, a transitional narration emerges, portraying figures precariously balancing between innovation and conservatism. With a discursive approach, this article will examine how The Bear follows this contradictory pattern, seemingly dismissing crystalized representational myths of Italian descent in the USA and simultaneously validating them.

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