The New Italian Cinema of Precarity
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Book Presentation:
«This is an excellent and innovative study of one of the most crucial topics of today. Using gender, sexuality, and race as theoretical frameworks, The New Italian Cinema of Precarity brilliantly enlivens the study of precarity and unemployment as portrayed in contemporary Italian cinema. A must-have for both students and scholars.» (Dr. Paolo Chirumbolo, Louisiana State University)
The book provides one of the first explorations of contemporary Italian cinematic depictions of precarity. In 2008, the world faced a significant financial crisis, leading to the emergence of the socio-economic phenomenon known as precarity. In Italy, precarity is a national issue, primarily referring to the widespread prevalence of temporary work, impacting the lifestyles of many minorities due to Italian legislation. Precarity has consequently become a recurring theme in contemporary Italian cinema, portraying characters with precarious lives marked by unpredictability, lack of job security, and material or psychological well-being, thereby becoming existential precarious characters.
This book analyses seventeen popular Italian contemporary films, revealing their complex interplay between cinema and society. This interplay challenges traditional notions of Italianness in cinema and illustrates how characters’ precarity intersects with other issues such as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, bringing further nuance to contemporary Italian identities, which are heterogeneous and plural.
About the Author:
Maria Elena Alampi is currently a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Exeter, working on Italian girlhood and media for the AHRC project «A Girls’ Eye-view: Girlhood on the Italian Screen since the 1950s». She obtained her PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2021. Her research interests focus on Italian cinema, particularly labour, precarity, and gender representations. She has recently published several articles and co-edited special issues on the themes of precarity and gender. In 2020, she co-founded the international academic network known as The Cinematic Precarity Research Network. Additionally, in 2021, she worked as a Research Assistant for B-Film-International Research Centre of Film Scholars at the University of Birmingham and co-organised with the Italian Studies department «Let’s Queer It(aly)», a series of online meetings about queer culture in Italy, which won the SIS EDI Awards 2021.
See the publisher website: Peter Lang
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