Reimagining the Italian South: Migration, Translation and Subjectivity in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema

Description

Images of Southern Italy as a place of arrival for migrants with different origins and backgrounds are in recent years proliferating on Italian medias, as well as in contemporary Italian literature and cinema. The unprecedented perspective on the mezzogiorno which presents the region as a place where people arrive and not only as a place of departure, represents a major change in the collective imaginary on the Italian South. This perspective is today articulated in new ways with the longstanding representation of the South as the forever “backward” part of the country. This book presents one of the first studies to focus entirely, through in-depth readings of a range of contemporary literary and cinematic texts, on the representation of contemporary migration to the Italian South, and on the concomitant changes in the tradition of representation of the region. Through the analysis, informed by translation theory and by decolonial, queer and feminist critique, of the mutual construction of race, gender and sexuality, and of the translation and hybridization of languages and cultures, in texts which tell multiple stories of mobility to and through the South, this book traces the emergence of a transnational imaginary of the mezzogiorno which offers useful tools for an urgent reconfiguration of collective and individual identities.