Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa -- Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema

INTRODUCTION Chapter One: From "Making Italians" to Envisioning Postcolonial Italy Chapter Two: Mixed-Race Relationships in the Italian Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginary... Chapter Three: Negotiations of Interracial Identity and Citizenship in the Post-War Cinema and Beyond Chapter Four: Transatlantic Crossings: Representing Hierarchies of Whiteness in the Cinema of the Economic Miracle Chapter Five: Zumurrud in her Camera: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Global South in Contemporary Italian Film CONCLUSION Filmography Bibliography Index

Shelleen Greene is Associate Professor, Department of Art and Design, at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA.

Equivocal Subjects is an important and innovative piece of scholarship. It offers new and much needed insight into Italian cinema and its histories of race. Equally challenging perhaps is its insistence on 'Italy as a site of African diasporic identity formation.' Greene's focus on the mixed-race subject revises the history of Italian cinema, and suggestively re-routes the contours of overly familiar geographies of racial difference. --Derek Duncan, Professor of Italian Cultural Studies, University of Bristol, UK. Greene's illuminating book draws on an impressive range of sources to explore the intersecting constructions of race and nation in Italian cinema over the course of a century. Combining historical analysis with close readings of landmark films, this persuasively argued account makes a pathbreaking contribution to Italian film studies.--Aine O'Healy, Professor of Italian and Director of the Humanities Program, Loyola Marymount University, USA This is a highly original and insightful study of the figure of the mixed-race subject in Italian cinema. Covering films from the early 20th century to those dealing with contemporary representations of Italian-African interracial relationships, the book shows the continuing legacy of racial discourses linked to colonialism, migration and Italy's historic North/South division. In its specific examination of the Italy-Africa mixture, it goes beyond the traditional identification of the mixed-race subject as simply the off-spring of Italian and African parents and identifies Italians themselves as mixed-race. Highlighting Italy's own internal racialisation of the Italian South and Italians' ascribed racial in-betweenness, Greene brilliantly highlights the contextual and precarious nature of racial identities and categorisation. She makes a compelling argument about how 'mixed-race' is a particularly unique lens through which to investigate ideologies of race and nation in Italy.--Jacqueline Andall, Senior Lecturer in