Description
Book SynopsisWomen and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality puts gender at the centre of cinematic representations of contemporary transnational Italian identities. It offers an intersectional feminist analysis of the ways in which transnational migration has been represented, understood, and constructed in the contemporary cinema of Italy. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality and in dialogue with postcolonial and decolonial theory, queer studies, and feminist critiques, the six chapters of the book focus on a series of exemplary fiction films from the last twenty years, which both reflect and shape the nation’s responses to the growing presence of transnational migrants in Italian society. The book shows how questions of gender, sexual difference, and reproductivity have been central to Italian filmmakers’ approaches to stories of mobility and displacement. Gender is also enmeshed in the rhetoric and poetic of hospitality that filmmakers propose as a critical framework to condemn Italian border policies and politics.
Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality traces an arc that moves from the embrace of a humanitarian rhetoric of infinite hospitality toward migrants, apparent in films produced in the early 2000s, to a more fluid understanding of Italian identities from a transnational perspective.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsPreface: Representing Migration in the Time of the CoronavirusChapter One
Introduction: Screening Migrant Hospitality
Chapter Two
The Limits of Hospitality: Marco Tullio Giordana’s
Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti and Ivano De Matteo’s
La bella genteChapter Three
Maternal Hospitality and Liquid Maternity on Screen
Chapter Four
Women and the City: Female Forms of Hospitality in Marina Spada’s
Come l’ombra and Giulia Ciniselli and Anna Bernasconi’s
Via Padova: Istruzioni per l’usoChapter Five
Guest Stars: Performing Hospitality in the Italian Film Industry
Chapter Six
Conclusion: No Longer Guests: G2 Filmmakers and Their Stories
BibliographyFilmography
