Explores Italian national identity.
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 the historical and contemporary formations of Italian national identity. In doing so, the work illuminates Italy past and present as well as the local and global dimensions of national identity in general.
Whether considering opera or Ninja Turtles, these 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. Exile, nationalism, and imagined communities are the topics of several essays, including Antonio Negri’s reflection on his own experience of political militancy and exile. Others focus on Italy’s colonial “unconscious,” Mussolini’s adventures in North Africa, and racism from the late nineteenth century to the present. By analyzing Italy’s European and Mediterranean identities, its highly regional character, its north-south economic imbalance, and its ethnic complexity, this truly interdisciplinary volume resists the hierarchizing and monumentalizing of traditional Italian studies in the United States. It will inform and redirect our understanding of what constitutes “Italy.”Contributors: Mohamed Aden; John Agnew, Syracuse U; Ayele Bekerie, Cornell U; Elaine K. Chang, Rutgers U; Antonio Marazzi, U of Padua, Italy; Francesca Miller, U of California, Davis; Antonio Negri, U of Paris VIII, France; Graziella Parati, Dartmouth College; Karen Pinkus, Northwestern U; Paul Robinson, Stanford U; Pasquale Verdicchio, U of California, San Diego; Marguerite R. Waller, U of California, Riverside; and David Ward, Wellesley College.Integrating film and cultural theory with close analysis of promotional materials, entertainment news, trade publications, and economic reports, Acland presents an array of evidence for the new understanding of movies and moviegoing that has developed within popular culture and the entertainment industry. In particular, he dissects a key development: the rise of the megaplex, characterized by large auditoriums, plentiful screens, and consumer activities other than film viewing. He traces its genesis from the re-entry of studios into the movie exhibition business in 1986 through 1998, when reports of the economic destabilization of exhibition began to surface, just as the rise of so-called e-cinema signaled another wave of change. Documenting the current tendency toward an accelerated cinema culture, one that appears to arrive simultaneously for everyone, everywhere, Screen Traffic unearths and critiques the corporate and cultural forces contributing to the “felt internationalism” of our global era.
An exciting analysis of the myriad literary effects of Tiananmen, Belinda Kong's Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square is the first full-length study of fictions related to the 1989 movement and massacre. More than any other episode in recent world history, Tiananmen has brought a distinctly politicized Chinese literary diaspora into stark relief.
Kong redefines Tiananmen's meaning from an event that ended in local political failure to one that succeeded in producing a vital dimension of contemporary transnational writing today. She spotlights key writers-Gao Xingjian, Ha Jin, Annie Wang, and Ma Jian-who have written and published about the massacre from abroad. Their outsider/distanced perspectives inform their work, and reveal how diaspora writers continually reimagine Tiananmen's relevance to the post-1989 world at large.
Compelling us to think about how Chinese culture, identity, and politics are being defined in the diaspora, Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square candidly addresses issues of political exile, historical trauma, global capital, and state biopower.
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