Migrant Anxieties

Aine O’Healy

Description

During a period of heightened global concerns about the movement of immigrants and refugees across borders, Migrant Anxieties explores how filmmakers in Italy have probed the tensions accompanying the country's shift from an emigrant nation to a destination point for over five million immigrants over the course of three decades. Áine O'Healy traces a phenomenology of anxiety that is not only present at the sociopolitical level but also interwoven into the narrative strategies of over 30 films produced since 1990, throwing into sharp relief the interface between the local and the global in this transnational era. Starting with the representation of post-communist migrations to Italy from Eastern Europe and subsequent arrivals from Africa through the controversial frontier of Lampedusa, O'Healy explores topics as diverse as the configuration of migrant labor, affective surrogacy, Italian whiteness, and the legacy of Italy's colonial history. Showing how contemporary filmmaking practices in Italy are linked to changes in the broader media landscape, O'Healy analyzes the ways in which both Italian and migrant filmmakers are reimagining Italian society and remapping the nation's borderscape.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. After 1989: Projecting the Balkans
2. Traffic from the East: Gender, Labor, and Biopolitics
3. African Immigration in the 1990s
4. Migration, Masculinity, and Italy's New Urban Geographies
5. Imagining an Expanded Mediterranean Borderscape
6. Living with Difference: From Noir to Melodrama
Afterword: Accented and Transnational Filmmaking in Italy
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Mediterranean
• HISTORY
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Película fotográfica
• Emigration
• Mediterranean Sea
• Italy
• History of Europe
• History of film
• Albania
• My Last Duchess
• Exxon Valdez
• Migration
• Lampedusa
• Film
• Balkans
• Immigration
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 24 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253037206
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

MIGRANT ANXIETIES
NEW DIRECTIONS IN NATIONAL CINEMAS
Robert Rushing, editor
MIGRANT ANXIETIES
Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame
ine O Healy
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by ine O Healy
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: O Healy, ine, author.
Title: Migrant anxieties : Italian cinema in a transnational frame / ine O Healy.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2019. | Series: New directions in national cinemas | Includes filmography. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018019389 (print) | LCCN 2018021737 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253037206 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253037176 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253037183 (pb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Emigration and immigration in motion pictures. | Immigrants in motion pictures. | Motion pictures-Italy-History-20th century. | Motion pictures-Italy-History-21st century.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.E44 (ebook) | LCC PN1995.9.E44 O34 2018 (print) | DDC 791.43/6552-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019389
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
For William Van Watson
in memoriam
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. After 1989: Projecting the Balkans
2. Traffic from the East: Gender, Labor, and Biopolitics
3. African Immigration in the 1990s
4. Migration, Masculinity, and Italy s New Urban Geographies
5. Imagining an Expanded Mediterranean Borderscape
6. Living with Difference: From Noir to Melodrama
Afterword: Accented and Transnational Filmmaking in Italy
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
F IRST , I OWE sincere thanks to Jacqueline Reich, former editor of the New Directions in National Cinema series, who encouraged me years ago to submit my book proposal to Indiana University Press. I am equally grateful to the current series editor, Robert Rushing, and to Janice Frisch, acquisitions editor, who oversaw the publication of the manuscript. I also thank the anonymous reviewers, whose feedback has helped me to refine my ideas and sharpen my arguments.
Loyola Marymount University provided me with vital support at various stages of the book s gestation, including a semester-long research fellowship as well as three summer grants. A Fulbright award to Italy in 2010 enabled me to narrow my broader project to a manageable field of inquiry. Finally, a visiting research professorship at La Sapienza University of Rome in the spring of 2017 made it possible for me to wrap up the manuscript under the most congenial circumstances imaginable, thanks to Caterina Romeo s generous invitation and vibrant collegiality, for which I will always be thankful.
I wish to acknowledge several friends and colleagues who invited me to share portions of this project as talks at their universities or as papers at symposia they had organized; these include Guido Bonsaver (Oxford University), Rosetta Caponetto (Auburn University), Mark Chu and Silvia Ross (University College Cork), Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld (Vassar College), Derek Duncan (University of Bristol), Sally Faulkner (University of Exeter), Claudio Gaetani (Universit di Macerata), Terri Ginsberg (American University at Cairo), William Hope (University of Salford), Alan O Leary (University of Leeds), Catherine Portolano (American University of Rome), Dana Renga (Ohio State University), Caterina Romeo (La Sapienza University of Rome), Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler (University of Innsbruck), and Marguerite Waller (University of California Riverside). I am particularly thankful to Bernadette Luciano for inviting me to present an early part of this project as a keynote talk at the Australasia Conference of Italian Studies at the University of Auckland in 2009 and to Fulvio Orsitto for a similar keynote invitation to the Echi d Oltremare Conference in Rome in 2011.
I also wish to thank Stefano Liberti, Andrea Segre, and Dagmawi Yimer, who offered me rich insights on many crucial issues implicated in my research. Additionally, I am grateful to Millicent Marcus for providing generous feedback on my early project proposal. To Danielle Hipkins I am grateful not only for the opportunity to exchange places for a semester in Los Angeles and Exeter but also for many helpful insights and research-related suggestions that have proved invaluable. For productive conversations with scholars engaged in similar or related research, all of which helped to move my project forward, I offer my gratitude to Rodica Diaconescu Blumenfeld, Clarissa Cl , Leonardo De Franceschi, Derek Duncan, Valerio Ferme, Shelleen Greene, Anik Imre, Giancarlo Lombardi, Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Nicoletta Marini-Maio, Graziella Parati, Marco Purpura, Luisa Rivi, SA Smythe, and Gaoheng Zhang. A special thanks to Paola Moscarelli, my close colleague at Loyola Marymount University, whose incisive observations on contemporary Italian politics and society have enriched both my teaching and research. I also extend my thanks to Alice Bardan, film scholar, friend, and fellow cinephile, for many stimulating exchanges on film theory and on recent developments in the cinemas of Europe. To Kamil Turowski I am indebted for his expert skill in capturing and tweaking the screen shots reproduced in this book. And I thank most especially Katarzyna Marciniak, my longtime interlocutor on issues regarding migration and the transnational, without whose intellectual support, encouragement, and feedback the book might never have been finished.
I owe much gratitude to my family, especially to Ed for his enthusiasm throughout the gestation of this book and for his always useful and often challenging comments on various drafts of the manuscript. I am thankful to Lola for her vitality and creativity, which inspired me to push through with the project even when it seemed unending. I am indebted to Mair ad for her generous help with proofreading. Warm thanks also to Liz, Ann Lorraine, Ita, Se n, and Maeve for their affection and support.
Finally, I dedicate this book to the memory of Van Watson, cherished friend, gifted scholar, and exuberant traveling companion whose early death was not unconnected to systemic injustices of academic employment in the contemporary United States.
MIGRANT ANXIETIES
Introduction
T HE SHIFTS AND upheavals that swept through Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, including the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, the outbreak of war in the Balkans, and the transformation of the European Economic Community (EEC) into the European Union (EU), were paralleled in the global South by ongoing political conflicts and economic devastation. In the early 1990s, this turbulent conjunction of circumstances prompted the simultaneous movement of large numbers of migrants from the former socialist states and the African continent toward the more affluent countries of Europe. Due to its relative prosperity and crucial location in the central Mediterranean, Italy became in a short period of time the unwitting host to growing numbers of foreigners, with tens of thousands of migrants arriving each year from various points of origin. As the country dramatically reversed its status as a predominantly emigrant nation, 1 aspiring immigrants received an ambivalent welcome, being perceived from the outset both as a potential solution to growing shortages in the labor market and a threat to the security, prosperity, and cultural traditions of Italians themselves. To add to these tensions, Italy was simultaneously being called on to conceive of itself no longer as an entirely freestanding sovereign nation but rather as a member of the supranational body of the European Union, bound by obligations formulated outside its borders. 2
This book explores a corpus of films produced in Italy between 1990 and 2016 that reverberate to varying degrees with anxieties induced by globalization-particularly by the sharp increase in the flow of immigration from the east and the global South, the uncertainties of the neoliberal economic order, and the necessity to conform to European mandates. Encompassing both critically acclaimed dramas and popular genre films and directed almost exclusively by Italian-born filmmakers, this body of audiovisual texts offers provocative insights into Italian fears and investments vis- -vis the globalizing world. My overarching aim is to unravel some of the complex issues interwoven in representations of the immigrant or the foreigner in these cinematic texts, representations that symptomatize the shifting identifications and oppositions that have marked Italian society since the end of the Cold War. The films explored here raise questions related to Italy s historically fragile sense of nationhood as well as its often poorly acknowledged histories of colonial conquest and emigration.
In the early 1990s, as mass immigration to Italy was in its initially intensive phase, films involving migrant characters represented a mere trickle in the total number of features released each year. In the first decade of