Marianna Charitonidou, “Gender and Migrant Roles in Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Films: Cinema as an Apparatus of Reconfiguration of National Identity and ‘Otherness’”, Humanities 10(2) (2021) (original) (raw)
The article examines an ensemble of gender and migrant roles in post-war Neorealist and New Migrant Italian films. Its main objective is to analyze gender and placemaking practices in an ensemble of films, addressing these practices on a symbolic level. The main argument of the article is that the way gender and migrant roles were conceived in the Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema was based on the intention to challenge certain stereotypes characterizing the understanding of national identity and ‘otherness’. The article presents how the roles of borgatari and women function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain for problematizing the relationship between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Special attention is paid to how migrants are related to the reconceptualization of Italy’s national narrations. The Neorealist model is understood here as a precursor of the narrative strategies that one encounters in numerous films belonging to the New Migrant cinema in Italy. The article also explores how certain aspects of more contemporary studies of migrant cinema in Italy could illuminate our understanding of Neorealist cinema and its relation to national narratives. To connect gender representation and migrant roles in Italian cinema, the article focuses on the analysis of the status of certain roles of women, paying particular attention to Anna Magnagi’s roles.
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Humanities research, 2021
The article examines an ensemble of gender and migrant roles in post-war Neorealist and New Migrant Italian films. Its main objective is to analyze gender and placemaking practices in an ensemble of films, addressing these practices on a symbolic level. The main argument of the article is that the way gender and migrant roles were conceived in the Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema was based on the intention to challenge certain stereotypes characterizing the understanding of national identity and ‘otherness’. The article presents how the roles of borgatari and women function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain for problematizing the relationship between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Special attention is paid to how migrants are related to the reconceptualization of Italy’s national narrations. The Neorealist model is understood here as a precursor of the narrative strategies that one encounters in numerous...
Unauthorised immigration has emerged as a generalised fact in all Western economies in the post-Second World War era. The paper, drawing upon the situation of the so-called baraccati in post-WWII Rome as presented in Vittorio De Sica’s movie The roof (1956), aims to present how migrant incorporation triggers processes of place-making which open up new social and conceptual spaces in the city. Τhe cinematic representations of working women in the Italian Neorealist cinema reveal filmmakers’ perception of a newly conceptualized Italy. Τhe roles of baraccati and women in Italian Neorealist cinema function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain in order to reflect on the intersections between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Taking as a starting point the fact that domesticity is a construction of the nineteenth century, the main objective is to shed light on how migration challenges the concepts of user, domesticity and citizenship. Saskia Sassen’s understanding of immigration as “a process constituted by human beings with will and agency, with multiple identities and life trajectories beyond the fact of being seen, defined and categorised as immigrants for the purposes of the receiving polity, economy and society” is useful in order to better grasp the impact of migration on the status of public space, leading to a more open conception of it and to the reconceptualization of the notion of place beyond traditional definitions, while challenging the boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic. Migrant incorporation triggers processes of place-making which open up new social and conceptual spaces in the city. Over the last four decades, there is a changing paradigm in migration studies that are gradually paying more and more attention to the gender composition of the migration streams. This trend of studying conjointly gender and migration phenomena becomes more and more dominant. Special attention is paid to methods of gender and migration scholarship drawing on social science approaches, treating gender as an institutional part of immigration studies and establishing legitimacy for gender in immigration studies. By the 1990s, research started emphasizing migration as a gendered process, promoting gender as a dynamic and constitutive element of migration and immigrant integration. This paper seeks to present how these intersections between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies can provide a new reading of the concepts of domesticity, citizenship and displacement in Italian Neorealist cinema.
Unauthorised immigration has emerged as a generalised fact in all Western economies in the post-Second World War era. The paper, drawing upon the situation of the so-called baraccati in post-WWII Rome as presented in Vittorio De Sica’s movie The roof (1956), aims to present how migrant incorporation triggers processes of place-making which open up new social and conceptual spaces in the city. Τhe cinematic representations of working women in the Italian Neorealist cinema reveal filmmakers’ perception of a newly conceptualized Italy. Τhe roles of baraccati and women in Italian Neorealist cinema function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain in order to reflect on the intersections between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Taking as a starting point the fact that domesticity is a construction of the nineteenth century, the main objective is to shed light on how migration challenges the concepts of user, domesticity and citizenship. Saskia Sassen’s understanding of immigration as “a process constituted by human beings with will and agency, with multiple identities and life trajectories beyond the fact of being seen, defined and categorised as immigrants for the purposes of the receiving polity, economy and society” is useful in order to better grasp the impact of migration on the status of public space, leading to a more open conception of it and to the reconceptualization of the notion of place beyond traditional definitions, while challenging the boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic. Migrant incorporation triggers processes of place-making which open up new social and conceptual spaces in the city. Over the last four decades, there is a changing paradigm in migration studies that are gradually paying more and more attention to the gender composition of the migration streams. This trend of studying conjointly gender and migration phenomena becomes more and more dominant. Special attention is paid to methods of gender and migration scholarship drawing on social science approaches, treating gender as an institutional part of immigration studies and establishing legitimacy for gender in immigration studies. By the 1990s, research started emphasizing migration as a gendered process, promoting gender as a dynamic and constitutive element of migration and immigrant integration. This paper seeks to present how these intersections between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies can provide a new reading of the concepts of domesticity, citizenship and displacement in Italian Neorealist cinema.
Review of Migrant anxieties: Italian cinema in a transnational frame, by Áine O'Healy
Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2023
Áine O’Healy’s important book explores a heterogenous corpus of films produced in Italy between 1990 and 2017, films which channel anxieties generated by increased immigration to Italy, by the consequences of EU membership and by processes of globalization more generally. Scholars of Italian and transnational cinemas have much to learn from O’Healy’s forensic attention to the rhetoric and aporias of film texts and from the character of her political commitment to key questions of our time. O’Healy’s meticulously performed and reported analysis shows that there is no contradiction between rigorous and engaged scholarship. Migrant Anxieties is essential reading for the knowledge it contains even as it offers an exemplary lightness of touch in the discussion of difficult and complex phenomena.
Italian Sociological Review, 2017
The mass media are more than ever taking on the role of a socialization agency and contributing to the construction of new social representations. They are producing and perpetuating stereotypes that get crystallized in the individual and collective imagination, determined and defined by the goods produced by the culture industry. For decades now, and with different disciplinary approaches, the social sciences have demonstrated the role and importance of the mass media in constructing the social representations, stereotypes and prejudices of immigrants, and therefore the relationships between the different groups and cultures that live throughout the land. The present article deals with the major results of an empirical research, conducted at the Sapienza University of Rome, on the relationship between Italian cinema and the topic of migration: a topic that has always been a favorite leitmotif of the mass media the world over, especially cinema. The main objective of this survey was...
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