Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame by Áine O'Healy (review)

For decades Áine O'Healy has been a leading interpreter of transnational dynamics in Italian cinema. Italian fiction films concerning migrations under changing economic and political circumstances since the late 1980s have been steadily garnering critical attention both for shedding light on a crucial aspect of Italy's contemporary social reality and for providing a comparative lens to study similar films made in other European countries. Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame represents the culmination of the author's contributions to the field and to Italian cinema studies more generally, and, in the reviewer's opinion, will remain the most authoritative text on the subject for years to come. Written in an engaging and elegant prose, the book provides historically-contextualized, sophisticated analyses of migrations to Italy in mostly fiction films. For readers who are familiar with O'Healy's numerous previous essays on the subject, they will be pleasantly surprised by her current effort at advancing a broader argument about these heterogeneous films. For those who encounter her writings for the first time, they will be delighted to appreciate the subject through her theoreticallyinformed strategic close readings of the films.

O'Healy's main argument in this book pertains to how relevant films dating between 1990 and 2016 "reverberate with anxieties induced by globalization" (1)—be those about foreign immigration, the forces of neoliberal economy, or European Union-level factors; these anxieties regard "race, gender, nativity, border construction, and multiethnic cohabitation" (11). In a symptomatic reading of the films, she contends that the cultural work that Italian and migrant filmmakers perform ultimately ushers in "new subjectivities and modes of being in the world" (11). For the author, this act is not only symbolic with reference to the films' representational dimension (which she often indicates by saying how the films resonate or register wider societal concerns), but it is also tangible in their contestation of prevalent political and media ethics about migration management, borderscapes, and neoliberalism (225). Thus O'Healy's contention showcases the role cinema can play in influencing the Italian cultural domain and re-fashioning one-dimensional discourses concerning alterity. (However, to what extent migration management stakeholders and average Italians respond to this corpus of films is not discussed in the book. As a result, I am unsure about the outreach of this cultural work beyond the filmmakers, a limited pool of critics and audiences, and perhaps actors or documentary subjects). To my mind, this interpretive premise and framework is absolutely necessary for a humanistic discussion of transnational transactions in Italian cinema about migrations, because the majority of social scientists, activists, media operators, and general audience members with deep or some knowledge on global mobilities are invested in finding pragmatic, theoretical, humanitarian, or political solutions to the concrete problems at hand, and as a consequence they often find humanistic inquiry of immigration issues to be, to say the least, perplexing and inefficient. What is a humanistic solution to addressing the influx of immigrants and their cohabitation with the autochthonous that Italian cinema provides? I believe this is a major key to approaching O'Healy's intricate and evocative narrative and cinematic analyses that draw from contemporary theories ranging from ethics to biopolitics, from gender (feminist theory in particular) to race studies, and from border to postcolonial studies.

In fact, one strength of O'Healy's book consists in its nimble use of multiple theories and the extreme care she takes in selecting them to address various aspects of migrants' and Italians' anxieties in these films. Simply put, this is a more honest and appropriate approach to framing and examining such a complex social and affective reality as migration; but it is also intellectually challenging to be able to select, explain, and cohere these theoretical insights within the space of a monograph. In doing this, the author makes sure that certain key concepts recur in several chapters in order to gain a particular interpretive force. For example, abjection as a condition...