"Other" as "Us": Migration in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema

This study examines the work of a group of contemporary Italian authors and film makers who explore the theme of migration by articulating the connections between Italian historical out-migration and contemporary in-migration to Italy. The four authors I consider here, Vincenzo Consolo, Erri De Luca, Gianni Amelio, and Emanuele Crialese, not only exemplify practices of resistance to the transformation of the "who" of the modern migrant into a "what", but raise important questions concerning the idea of foreignness, the ideology of the nation-state and, ultimately, associations based on qualified identity itself. Through their use of the memory of Italian out-migration following unification, these authors seek to remind Italians that they too once asked for hospitality in unknown lands, and suffered the prejudices of peoples to whom their own customs and cultures appeared strange and threatening. In this sense, these authors’ works elicit sentiments of empathy for the “non-person” of the contemporary immigrant, for the human being who is reified as a simple labor producer by current economic and political discourses. Yet, in these authors’ work empathy also becomes a means by which to transcend the false logic of the ideology of the nation-state and imagine new ways of associating based upon a solidarity that is not born from legal and juridical orders but from shared histories of oppression. Through the examination of clusters of their works I illustrate how contemporary Italian literary and cinematic culture can deploy stories of historical Italian emigration in order to create a basis for a transnational sense of solidarity with contemporary migrants based on shared histories of trauma, while re-imagining the possibilities for a shared existence that does not involve the violence and exclusion of the nation-state.