Mediterranean Passages: Abjection and Belonging in Contemporary Italian Cinema

Abstract

Due to the confluence of economic and geopolitical circumstances, in the early 1990s Italy became a destination or transit point for large numbers of asylum seekers, refugees, and other aspiring immigrants who found their way to Italian shores aboard fishing trawlers, rafts, speedboats, or rusty cargo ships. Reversing the country's status as an emigrant nation, this phenomenon rapidly changed the demographic face of Italy and drew attention to the porousness of its maritime boundary. Although most immigrants no longer arrive by sea, images of Italy's boat people have attained iconic status in the national imaginary, lending to the ongoing representation of Italian immigration a distinctly Mediterranean valence. This essay explores a cluster of films made in Italy over the past eighteen years, films that feature images of illicit maritime migration and clandestine disembarkation. In contrast to the xenophobic tone that has often characterized the representation of immigrants in Italy's mass media, most of these films adopt an ostensibly sympathetic perspective on migration. Yet, at the same time, they resonate obliquely with older patterns of prejudice, including the traditionally negative attitudes expressed toward Italians of the South. Though conjuring up narratives of survival or redemption, emphasizing the humanity of the foreigner/immigrant, and allowing the protagonists to be heard in unfamiliar languages, the films that constitute Italy’s emerging cinema of migration reveal unresolved anxieties about the boundaries of the Italian body politic in relation to its internal and external others.