This panel builds upon existing scholarship, including the work of Greene and Caminati, who have contributed to the field of Italian postcolonial cinema for over a decade, including Greene's Equivocal Subjects (Bloomsbury, 2012), and Caminati's recent Traveling Auteurs: The Geopolitics of Postwar Italian Cinema (2024). We are joined by Antonio DiVilio, who brings expertise in urban geographies, modernist architectures, and comparative literature. The panel will elaborate migration through urban spaces and mobilities, as well as urban environments and ecological sustainability. Thus, our research follows the work of Camilla Hawthorne and her studies of migration, critical human geographies, and comparative analysis of African Italian and African American identity formations. We are also building upon the field of Italian ecocinema, as elaborated in the work Elena Past, which investigates Italian films that directly address environmental pollution and the human relation to the non-human. Our panel will also expand the parameters of Italian migrant cinemas as elaborated in Aine O'Healy's Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame (Indiana, 2019), by returning to the "long '68" as another historical moment in which to frame African migration to Italy, more than two decades before the advent of the field of Italian postcolonial studies.
The panel will have three presentations, each at 15 minutes each, followed by a 15-minute Q&A with audience members. Caminati's presentation, "Anticolonial Film and the Urban Migration in Giovanni Vento’s Africa in casa(1968)," reads the documentary film, Africa in casa (1968), directed by Giovanni Vento, as a key site for theorizing the entanglement of anticolonial cinema and post-war urban ecologies of migration. It reconceives migration not as a demographic phenomenon but as an ecological reconfiguration of metropolitan space, wherein colonial histories are sedimented within urban infrastructures and everyday spatial practices. Drawing on postcolonial film theory and spatial approaches, Caminati argues that Africa in casa relocates the colonial elsewhere into the domestic interior, staging the home as a threshold where imperial afterlives, racialized proximities, and uneven mobilities converge. Despite its descriptive mode, the film belongs to the broader tradition of anticolonial cinema of the long ’68, rendering the metropolis itself as a site where decolonization is lived and contested.
Greene's presentation, "Los Angeles and the Urban Geographies of Italian and African American Migration," returns to Franco Rossi’s 1962 film, Smog, a narrative about Italian ex-patriates set within a Los Angeles filled with a preponderance of signs of urban infrastructural development, oil extraction, modernist architecture, and ever-present air pollution. She offers a comparative reading of the postwar migrant mobilities of the city’s ethnic communities, proposing an eco-critical sensibility in Smog as well as other L.A. based films such as Killer of Sheep (1978).
Finally, Di Vilio's "Modernist Architecture and Urban Dispersion in Smog (1962)," interrogates the role played by the film’s broad ecology of Los Angeles– its architecture, cartographic dispersal, industrial planning, and geographic sprawl – foregrounding the ways in which these spatial determinations constitute not only the visual aesthetics of Los Angeles but the very conditions of living and perceiving the modern city. Mining the film's noir sensibilities and the history of Pier Maria Pasinetti, the Italian ex-patriate co-screenwriter, he examines migrant alienation through Los Angeles's mid-century golden era of modernist architecture, focusing on the various locations in the film, including the Los Angeles Airport Theme Building and the Stahl House. He argues that the architectures of Los Angeles host a community of Italian expatriates while also maintaining a degree of proximity and interaction with other minority groups, reflecting the layered social dynamics of the city.
This panel includes a diversity of scholarship by senior and junior scholars who work within Italian literature and film, and have advanced interdisciplinary scholarship through Italian postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, critical geography, and film studies.