In order, precisely to explore the affordances of the regional focus for Transnational studies the second chapter focuses on the histories of mobility that have, or have had, Southern Italy as one of their central nodes. It thus discusses different approaches in the newest works on the contemporary history of the South (1865-2020), and zeros in on contemporary scholarship on its transnational aspects: Emigration, Colonialism, Contemporary Migration to Italy. It discusses this production paying particular attention to the ways in which race, gender and sexuality, as interrelated phenomena, have been accounted for. By so doing, the chapter also provides essential information for contextualizing the literary and visual analysis in the following chapters.

Set in contemporary Palermo, Emma Dante's Via Castellana Bandiera (2013) offers a powerful exploration of the South as a site of cultural contact, interaction and confrontation by focusing on a western-like showdown between two women whose lives are differently marked by mobility and migration. In Dante's film, the simultaneous articulation of queerness and southernness is a way to queer the traditional image of the frontier and to offer an evocative elaboration on how identities are constructed, mobilised and played off against each other in the neoliberal context.

No abstract

Giulio Angioni’s novel Una ignota compagnia, first published in 1992, is discussed in Chapter III paying particular attention to the centrality that the use of various languages, and the mixing of them, acquires in the text. Even if the novel is certainly one of the first texts to appear in Italy to address the issue of what was starting to be perceived as Italian society becoming multicultural, it has not been the object of particularly sustained critical attention. Nonetheless Una ignota compagnia constitutes one of Angioni’s most ambitious texts, able as it is to confront the changes induced by globalization while engaging at the same time with diverse experiences of Sardinian emigration.

No abstract