Noir Expatriatism: Black Subjectivities in Anna's Sin

Abstract

This essay examines Anna's Sin (1953), an Italian Othello film adaptation in which novelist William Demby (1922-2013) appears as an expatriate jazz saxophonist hiding from his criminal past. I argue that the film presents the emergence of transnational Black subjectivities through its various strains of Catholic antiracism, philosophies of anticolonial struggle, and the postwar skepticism of the intellectual left. In Anna's Sin, the conflation of these various discourses is played out in the film's noir aesthetics, constituting what I define as a mode of noir expatriatism.