African Americans are excluded from the myth of the ‘nation of immigrants’ due to the forced nature of their relocation to the American continent. Yet, this exclusion can engender an association of blackness with lack of mobility and agency in the national imaginary, which obscures historical constrictions produced by slavery, segregation, and racism. In the last years, new narratives, ranging from historiography to cultural productions, have emerged that highlight how black Americans, despite all odds, have always resorted to migration as a way to fight racism. Cinema has played a major role in the representation of African Americans’ migrations as a fight to become masters of their own lives and has influenced the current reclaiming of the South in important ways.

Review of The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America by Giorgio Bertellini

In their ongoing exploration of issues related to race and social justice, independent filmmakers Marylou and Jerome Bongiorno have often focused on US cities and/or particular inner-city areas. The documentary Protecting New Orleans/Saving Venice (2006) stands out among their works for its emphasis on the geo-cultural links between America and Europe—for connecting the city of New Orleans and the rest of the Mississippi Delta to the world beyond the geographic and political borders of the US. This article examines the short film’s investigation into the causes and consequences of hurricane Katrina in light of Anil Narine’s notion of “eco-trauma cinema” (2014) and focuses on the transnational dimension of the environmental issues at stake. By connecting local struggles in two separate continents, Protecting New Orleans/Saving Venice promotes affective alliances that reach from the local to the global and envisages shifting conceptions of US national consciousness and belonging. With its companion short video NOLA (2006), it raises awareness about the human-induced causes of ‘natural’ events and presents an effective picture of similar risk scenarios involving far and different places (eerily prescient of the 2019 Venice flooding). By highlighting the imbrication of local places, ecologies, and cultural practices in global networks, these films contribute to laying the basis for “cosmopolitan forms of awareness and community, both ecologically and culturally” (Heise 2007, 210) and to fostering ideals of “world-traversing and world-transcending citizenship” (Lipsitz 2011, 216).

The essay examines the lives of two Czech film directors, Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer, in order to investigate the roles of exile and emigration in shaping their self-representation as cinematic authors and their filmic production. To this end, this article analyzes the experience of the two filmmakers in the U.S. through the various forms of their testimonies—biographies, autobiographies, interviews—eventually engaging in a concise comparison of their oeuvre. The sources analyzed hint at a personal and professional self-representation in terms of ‘émigrés.’

Review of L’uomo diventato donna e altri racconti by Sherwood Anderson (edited by Anna De Biasio)

This essay analyzes James Gray’s The Immigrant (2013) discussing it as an instance of post-ironic melodrama (Wlodek 2017) aimed at recovering the purity shown by this genre in the early phases of cinematic history. The essay argues that, although the movie pays evident homage to pre-classic silent-era melodramas, it also destabilizes the genre’s conventions by resorting to a particular use of the mise-en-scene and characterization. This directorial choice allows the film to retain pathos without eschewing ambivalence and indeterminacy, finally contributing to produce a complex representation of immigrants’ experience as well as a rather bleak portrait of the American Dream.

Review of Napoli/New York/Hollywood: La storia dell’emigrazione artistica italiana che ha cambiato il cinema americano e l’immagine degli italiani negli USA by Giuliana Muscio.

National identity plays an important role in defining many people’s attitude towards reality. Its representation has remained under the radar within the field of linguistics for decades, while being investigated in a number of different genres, from political speeches to advertisement; in this regard, however, a gap can be found when it comes to magazines. This study focuses on US national context and seeks to reveal how a range of discursive devices—including lexical, syntactic and metaphorical patterns—are used in the representation of nation and national identity in popular magazines published in the US. The analysis provides a comparison based on the target audience’s gender identity. A mixed methods approach is applied to two corpora, covering a time span between 2015 and 2020 and comprising a total of approximately 9 million words from popular magazines aimed respectively at a female (Allure, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair and Vogue) and male audience (Men’s Health, Popular Mechanics, Esquire and GQ). Firstly, we employed corpus-assisted methods to explore the data at a more general level, drawing on concordance and collocation analysis. Secondly, we carried out in-depth, qualitative analysis of relevant words and expressions looking at their wider textual context. Thirdly, we compared the results between corpora. The analysis shows some common patterns—e.g., a strong use of personification of the country, often represented as facing a moment of crisis—as well as differences in how these patterns are articulated in the two corpora.

This essay examines Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010) as an example of ‘slow’ and feminist western film. In particular, it shows how, by applying an “austere” aesthetics (Gorfinkel 2015) and by giving prominence to the act of migrating rather than the act of settling, the movie rewrites pioneer history, offering an example of what Catherine Russel defines “migrant cinema” (2017). Because of the visual centrality given to the act of migration, with its feeling of geographical displacement and psychological apprehension, the movie situates itself alongside other contemporary films representing present-day migration, and questions the traditional western movement as a travel of self-confident expansion and colonization. In this sense, Meek’s Cutoff can be rather read as a “decolonizing” (Trimble Young and Veracini 2017) rendition of white migration in the West, mostly achieved by including two destabilizing characters within the group of white settlers, Emily Tetherow and a Cayuse Indian, who trigger reflections on matters of knowledge and alliances.