This article argues that Mediterranean crime fiction is not simply a subgenre that showcases criminal organisations and beautiful landscapes, but also a formulation that overcomes the exclusionary ...European borders, and makes the “parent” label Euronoir more inclusive. In order to prove this point, this article analyses Andrea Camilleri’s Il ladro di merendine (1996) and Jean Claude Izzo’s Total Khéops (1996) through the lens of transculturality (Welsch) and the idea of “third space” (Bhabha). It shows how, with their reference to a common Mediterranean culture and history, these novels shape transcultural spaces where human beings coexist and adapt to each other. Both novels make use of the concept of “homecoming” as a counter-narrative for the present anti-immigration rhetoric, and represent the Mediterranean as a Mare Nostrum which, according to Paolo Rumiz’s formulation, is a space shared by those who inhabit it, where inhabiting does not necessarily coincide with belonging or possession. In doing so, Il ladro di merendine and Total Khéops represent Mediterranean cities as places where the encounter supersides conflict, overcoming the exclusionary mechanisms of the nation-state.
Recensione diAngelo Castagnino, ‘Fatevi portatori di storie’. Alessandro Perissinotto fra giallo e romanzo sociale, Ravenna, Giorgio Pozzi editore, 2018.
This article analyzes Nino Filastò’s novel entitled Tre giorni nella vita dell’avvocato Scalzi (1989), republished as Nella terra di nessuno (2001) after the homonymous 2000 film version featuring ...Ben Gazzara as the protagonist. Filastò is a defence lawyer and wrote this novel following his experience working with Italian terrorists held in high security prisons during the so-called Years of Lead. Through a story set in the 1980s in a fictional prison, Filastò denounces the situation in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, when the promulgation of emergency anti-terrorism laws prevented defence lawyers from discharging their professional duties towards their clients. On the one hand, these laws introduced more severe sentences for common crimes performed by terrorists; on the other they granted reduction of a sentence for those who accepted to cooperate with the police enquiries. Therefore, in the novel Filastò shows how these laws first imposed disproportionate punishment; then, by establishing a direct line between judges and the defendant, they provided a way out that nullified the function of the defence. By highlighting the mistreatment of inmates in high security prisons in a story of travesty of justice, Filastò is a precursor of a subsequent successful trend in Italy that sees judges, policemen, and lawyers use crime fiction to eviscerate the mechanisms of the Italian judiciary. His novel is also a powerful reminder of the risks of depriving human beings of their basic rights in order to pursue a fight against terrorism
By analysing the TV episode 'The Other End of the line' (2019) through the lens of Bhabha's concepts of 'third space' and 'hybridity' (1994), and Soja's formulation of 'thirdspace,' this article ...argues that, far from being escapist viewing, the Inspector Montalbano TV series (Italy, 1999-2021) is a 'geopolitical' crime series (Saunders 2020, 1) that challenges the 'nation-centred view of sovereign citizenship' (Bhabha 38) embodied by Matteo Salvini, the leader of the xenophobic Italian political party, Lega. This episode provides criticism of Salvini's policy of closed ports, which aimed to stop migration fluxes from Northern Africa, when the Lega was in power in Italy (2018-2019). By visualizing several 'thirdspaces', such as a rescue vessel, a port, and the village of Vigàta, where the story takes place, and populating the plot with characters who defy a Manichean view of 'us-versus-them', 'The Other End of the line' endorses the idea of an inclusive society characterized by 'a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy' (Bhabha 5). This article also argues that this episode invites viewers to act 'as active citizens' who 'must vigilantly guard against the state's strategies of exclusion and discrimination in the midst of its promises of formal equality and procedural democracy' (Bhabha xxi).
The Mediterranean Sea has always been of geopolitical strategic importance, but its presence in the media has grown in prominence since beginning of the Mediterranean refugee crisis in the early ...1990s (Mendes 568). This emergency has brought with it fragmentation and conflict as well as a reassessment the of Latin concept of Mare nostrum. Originally, the name Mare nostrum claimed the immense body of water, and its shores and trade, for Rome, and this term symbolized the vastness and power of the Roman Empire. The field of Mediterranean studies challenged this long-standing Eurocentric definition the Mediterranean. Fernand Braudel's conception of the Mediterranean as a physical and human unity offers a critical stimulus for scholarly inquiry that still influences the debate today. For instance, according to Amin Maalouf, Mediterranean identity is not an exclusive but an inclusive concept that puts together East and West as well as Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions (90). For Paolo Rumiz, Mare nostrum needs to be interpreted as the sea shared by those who inhabit it, where inhabiting does not necessarily coincide with belonging (136). Finally, Naor Ben-Yehoyada argues for a reemergence of the Mediterranean as a transnational region from World War Il to the present.
An analysis of the relationship between detective fiction and its setting, this book is the most wide-ranging examination of the way in which Italian detective fiction in the last 20 years has become ...a means to articulate the changes in the social landscape of the country.
The Foreign in International Crime Fiction Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda, Barbara Pezzotti / Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda, Barbara Pezzotti
2012, 2014, 2014-04-24, 2012-06-14
eBook
'The foreigner' is a familiar character in popular crime fiction, from the foreign detective whose outsider status provides a unique perspective on a familiar or exotic location to the xenophobic ...portrayal of the criminal 'other'. Exploring popular crime fiction from across the world, The Foreign in International Crime Fiction examines these popular works as 'transcultural contact zones' in which writers can tackle such issues as national identity, immigration, globalization and diaspora communities. Offering readings of 20th and 21st-century crime writing from Norway, the UK, India, China, Europe and Australasia, the essays in this book open up new directions for scholarship on crime writing and transnational literatures.
...they are a powerful example of the re-emergence of the Mediterranean as a transnational region (Ben-Yehoyada 2017). By making use of the concept of third space (Bhabha 1994), in this article I ...argue that they both endorse Braudel's concept of the Mediterranean Sea as a crossroads of cultures and Maalouf s idea of an inclusive Mediterranean identity (1998, 90). ...they are a powerful example of the «re-emergence of the Mediterranean as a transnational region» (Ben-Yehoyada 2017). According to Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity (1994), cultural dimensions can no longer be understood as being homogeneous or self-contained. For Bhabha, cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic, and meaning is produced in interstices that shift «theoretical concern away from the monolithic building blocks of culture- nation, race, class, colonizer, colonized-toward a reading of the "in-between" spaces, the spaces in excess of the sum of the parts of social and cultural differences» (ivi, 114).
Serial Crime Fiction Miranda, Carolina; Anderson, Jean; Pezzotti, Barbara
2015, 2015-08-28
eBook
Serial Crime Fiction is the first book to focus explicitly on the complexities of crime fiction seriality. Covering definitions and development of the serial form, implications of the setting, and ...marketing of the series, it studies authors such as Doyle, Sayers, Paretsky, Ellroy, Marklund, Camilleri, Borges, across print, film and television.
This article considers three recent graphic memoirs that focus on Italian transnational migration and its legacies: Elizabeth A. Povinelli's The Inheritance, Joshua Santospirito's Swallows (Part I), ...and Pia Valentini's Ferriera. We adopt the term carto-graphic memoirs (Mitchell
2007
; Norment
2012
), to describe graphic novels that aim to literally and metaphorically map transnational lives, identities, and memories, through complex artistic processes of autobiographical (re)orientation, drawing, storytelling, and intellectual reflection. Dominant narratives of Italian migration redeem the struggle and shame of migration through individual success, upward mobility, and racial 'whitening'. These three works challenge stereotypical representations of Italian migration, and Italian hyphenated identities, focusing instead on geographical, historical and autobiographical fragments that come together on the page to sketch provisional and fragile, yet emotionally and intellectually powerful patterns. Such patterns reveal histories and geographies of racism, class exploitation, violence, trauma, but also histories of physical, existential, cultural, linguistic and intellectual resistance, exchange, and creativity. Each of these memoirs locate Italian migrants and their descendants at the intersection of traumatic histories and geographies of nationalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and class exploitation. In doing so, they provide an extraordinary opportunity to rethink the relationship between transnational histories and individual lives.
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