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Bound by Distance takes its place among a growing body of scholarship the goal of which is to challenge the kind of thinking that reproduces the "West" as a stable and homogenous political and discursive entity. The Italian nation, with its peculiar process of formation, the continuous tensions between its own northern and southern regions, and its history of emigration, provides an important case for complicating and reassessing concepts of national, racial, economic, and cultural dominance. The author analyzes the interactive space of the history of Italian state formation, Italian subaltern literature, Italian emigrant writing, and the current situation of North African and Asian immigrants to Italy, in order to contest the "feigned homogeneity" of the Italian nation and to complicate and reassess concepts of national, racial, economic, and cultural dominance.
Home is established by our relationship to the world around us, wherever we are. Nevertheless, we also occupy the places of our absence. Culture is constructed, in passing through a place, in what is taken with the departure, in what is left behind. Culture is a matter of subtraction and offering. Approaches to Absence seeks to distinguish between the appearance of belonging, and the movement of being. Can we ever go "home" again? Yes, however we can't stay.
Publisher Description
This volume explores the Italian contribution to the current global phenomenon of a “return to reality” by examining the country’s rich cultural production in literature and cinema. The focus is particularly on works from the period spanning the Nineties to the present day which offer alternatives to notions of reality as manufactured by the collusion between the neo-liberal state and the media. The book also discusses Italy’s relationship with its own cultural past by investigating how Italian authors deal with the return of the specter of Neorealism as it haunts the modern artistic imagination in this new epoch of crisis. Furthermore, the volume engages in dialogue with previous works of criticism on contemporary Italian realism, while going beyond them in devoting equal attention to cinema and literature. The resulting interactions will aid the reader in understanding how the critical arts respond to the triumph of hyperrealism in the current era of the virtual spectacle as they seek new ways to promote cognitive transformations and foster ethical interventions.
This volume addresses the influence of Italian neorealist films on world cinema well beyond the post-World War II period associated with the movement. Despite its lack of organization and relatively short life span, the Italian neorealist movement deeply influenced directors and film traditions around the world. This collection examines the impact of Italian neorealism beyond the period of 1945-52, the years conventionally connected to the movement, and beyond the postwar Italian film industry where the movement originated. Providing a refreshing aesthetic and ideological contrast to mainstream Hollywood films, neorealist filmmakers demonstrated not only how an engaging narrative technique c...
The more than fifty authors represented come from across Canada and have backgrounds in all regions of Italy.
In these essays Pasquale Verdicchio stresses the need to view the cultural works of minority groups not solely from the perspective of their immigrant roots, but primarily as post-emigrant products. Through writings on diverse figures such as Antonio Gramsci, the Super Mario Brothers, or Spike Lee, and on subjects that range from literature to sculpture and photography, the author closes in on a possible intellectual synthesis for what might be considered the most complex question of this end of century: What is the identity and place of a minority individual?
More than any other nation, Italy -- from its imperial past to its subordinate present, from its colonial forays to its splendid isolation -- embodies the myriad and contradictory historical forms of nationhood. This volume covers a range of subjects drawn from Italy and abroad to study Italian national identity. Whether considering opera or Ninja Turtles, the essays reveal how cultural identity is constructed and manipulated -- an issue made urgent by the influx of African, Indochinese, and Eastern European immigrants into Italy today. Topics include exile, nationalism, and imagined communities, Italy's colonial "unconscious", and Mussolini's adventures in North Africa.
Bringing together new writing by some of the field’s most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy--as a territory of both matter and imagination--through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of approaches--including ecocriticism, film studies, environmental history and sociology, eco-art, and animal and landscape studies--to move past cliché and reimagine Italy as a hybrid, plural, eloquent place. Among the topics investigated are post-seismic rubble and the stratifying geosocial layers of the Anthropocene, the landscape connections in the work of writers such as Calvino and Buzzati, the conta...
The House Is Past brings together writing from a period spanning 1978-1998. It is the compilation of a portion of a life spent in a language that is borrowed and adapted, the document of an instance of cultural transition and transformation. The poetic trajectory is not simply linear and transformative, because Pasquale Verdicchio engages a variety of forms and manipulates language towards the integration of many cultural sources. The tide of the collection, reminiscent of Adorno, is a reflection on this possibility of working in tandem between languages and cultures, between histories and existences. The House is Past refers to the house as both a place of historical reference and historical loss. The past is a point of departure and reference, and the house a flexible construct, the materials of which are assembled according to the poet's cultural needs.