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Moveable identities: Migration, subjectivity and cinema in contemporary Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Enrica Capussotti
Enrica Capussotti*
Affiliation:
University of Siena, Italy
*
∗Email: capussotti@unisi.it; enrica.capussotti@eui.eu
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Abstract

Images and stories of migration within contemporary culture in Italy are shaped by several interconnections between the past (memories of Italian emigration, Italian poverty and rural society) and the present (Italy's postindustrial and multicultural realities). Analysing different texts, this article explores how the construction of the ‘official memory’ of the Italian emigration is used both to recall an anti-racist and sympathetic reception of today migrants and to conceal the specificity of today's mobility. In this context, the temporal categories of Eurocentric modernity are functional to the maintenance of hierarchical differences between ‘self’ (Italian and European) and different ‘others’ (the migrants). Although the system of representations is articulated around traditional dichotomies between North and South, East and West, and self and other, the article shows the crucial role of ‘migrancy’ cinema. It offers new trajectories, alliances and exchanges, which are significantly represented through the multiple crossings that challenge the walls of Fortress Europe in the Mediterranean.

Keywords

memoryemigrationimmigrationthe Mediterranean
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , February 2009 , pp. 55 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

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