Destination Italy: Representing Migration in Contemporary Media and Narrative

Italy is one of the most recent immigratory destinations in Europe, having long been one of the continent’s most important sources of emigration. Due to its strategic position in the Mediterranean, the Italian peninsula is a crossroads of complex transnational movements and represents a unique and dynamic context for the study of contemporary migration and its representation through the diverse channels of media, literature and film. The product of a two-year interdisciplinary research project into representations of migration to Italy, this volume brings together scholarly contributions from the fields of migration studies, linguistics, media, literature and film studies as well as essays by practitioners and activists. It provides both a multi-faceted snapshot of how diverse representations of immigration capture experiences and affect decision-making dynamics and an in-depth study of how media, literature and cinema contribute to the public perception of migrants within the destination culture. Author Biography Emma Bond is Lecturer in Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the literary relationship between space and identity, and particularly on border, migrant and transnational writing. Guido Bonsaver is Professor of Italian Cultural History at the University of Oxford. He works on the relationship between political history and narrative and has particular expertise in censorship, Fascism and film studies. Federico Faloppa is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Reading. His research centres around the linguistic construction of otherness, the dynamics of language and power, and intercultural communication.