Description:
1. This book stands out as unique in both its subject and approach. There are only a handful of books on post-1980 Italian cinema, and none that perform close analyses of those works. The author's approach challenges the prevalent wisdom - that there is no significant Italian cinema after Fellini - by weaving together conversations on numerous significant issues including primarily: transnationalism, race, and gender.
2. Migrant Anxieties uses Italian films from the past 30 years to explore anxieties and concerns regarding migration and borderscapes. The topic is highly relevant to current global concerns regarding immigration and nationalism.
3. This book demonstrates the adaptability of cinematic language and film genres as a way to explore a changing social landscape. It carefully shows the links between current anxieties and unresolved issues from Italy's past, particularly its history of emigration and colonization.
4. The author is a well-known and highly respected scholar of Italian cinema.
Review Quotes:
"This is a cutting-edge and ambitious project that fills a crucial lacuna in migration screen studies in the Italian context. O'Healy prompts readers to think in important ways about how race, nation, ethnicity, gender, borders, nativity, and citizenship are represented in cinema. This is a timely and important contribution."--Dana Renga, author of Watching Sympathetic Perpetrators on Italian Television: Gomorrah and Beyond
"Migrant Anxieties makes a truly outstanding contribution to contemporary Italian Film Studies and to understandings of the multiple effects of the global phenomenon of human displacement. Professor O'Healy draws on her profound knowledge of modern Italy's socio-political landscape to analyze a very substantial and varied collection of films about migration to Italy made from 1990 to more or less the present day. The sheer complexity of the migration phenomenon indexed not least by the variety of countries migrants to Italy come from requires an equally diverse set of interpretative tools in order to capture accurately how the host nation has responded to new arrivals and grasp the sense of the anxieties that their presence has generated. O'Healy's necessary eclecticism never overshadows her discussion of the films themselves nor of the challenging questions that they give voice to. Her deft use of film theory to explore issues of gender, for instance is accompanied by an impressively handled engagement with economic and social theory to illuminate the gendered enforcements of work and biopolitics. The book explores very tellingly Italy's expanding sense of place, and one of its key themes is race. It looks back to Italys own colonial history but also explores the nations uncertainties about its own racial identity and its place at the southern edge of Europe. O'Healy is acutely attentive to the political moment from which the films she discusses emerge, and her work very successfully maps both the changing face of Italy and of the socio-political circumstances of migrants themselves. In no sense does she simply give an account of a static phenomenon. The books final section reflects on recent films being made in Italy's self-consciously postcolonial landscape which invent a new visual vocabulary for a nation whose very complex cultural identity has been so graphically inscribed on screen. OHealy guides the reader through this cinematic landscape with great intellectual generosity and insight. Migrant Anxieties is both a work of sophisticated, engaged film scholarship and a perlucid dissection of contemporary Italian culture. "--Professor Derek Duncan at St Andrews University
"Migrant Anxieties is a compelling, up-to-date analysis of Italian migration cinema since the 1990s in a transnational perspective, under the critical lens of race, class, gender, and nationality."--Modern Language Review