Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy's Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies

Description:

Runner Up Winner of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize - Established Scholars, Cultural Studies Category
Winner of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize (20th & 21st Centuries)
Honorable Mention for the Howard R. Marraro Prize

By linking Italy's long history of emigration to all continents in the world, contemporary transnational migrations directed toward it, as well as the country's colonial legacies, Fiore's book poses Italy as a unique laboratory to rethink national belonging at large in our era of massive demographic mobility. Through an interdisciplinary cultural approach, the book finds traces of globalization in a past that may hold interesting lessons about inclusiveness for the present.

Fiore rethinks Italy's formation and development on a transnational map through cultural analysis of travel, living, and work spaces as depicted in literary, filmic, and musical texts. By demonstrating how immigration in Italy today is preoccupied by its past emigration and colonialism, the book stresses commonalities and dispels preoccupations.

Brief description: Teresa Fiore is the Inserra Endowed Chair in Italian American Studies at Montclair State University. She is the author of Preoccupied Spaces: Remapping Italy's Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies (Fordham University Press, 2017) and editor of the 2006 issue of Quaderni del '900, devoted to John Fante. Her numerous articles on migration to and from Italy linked to twentieth-and twenty-first-century Italian literature and cinema have appeared in Italian, English, and Spanish in both journals and edited collections. Two articles by her on new migration flows from Italy were recently published by Routledge and the University of Illinois Press in volumes about Italians in the United States.

Review Quotes: Teresa Fiore's Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy's Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies successfully integrates three legacies of migrations that are more often treated separately: the traces of Italy's history of emigration, immigration, and colonialism.-- "Annali di Italianistica"