Presented by the UCLA Departments of Italian and of Film, Television, and Digital Media, the symposium brings together artists and scholars to examine recent literary and cinematic representations of non-Western migration.
Novelist, poet and essayist UBAH CRISTINA ALI FARAH—author of Little Mother (2011), a narrative about the Somali diaspora in Africa, Italy, and other countries—will present a reinterpretation of the paradigmatic tale about civil and moral strife which is Sophocles’ Antigone. ANDREA SEGRE, sociologist and director of many documentary and fiction films examining transnational migration to Italy, will screen and discuss his recent feature film The Order of Things (2017), based on transnational networks of political, military, criminal and non-governmental organizations involved in European immigration policies. Filmmaker and citizenship activist MEDHIN PAOLOS will screen and discuss Asmarina (2015), a documentary about the Eritrean/Ethiopian community of Milan. Sociologist ALESSANDRO DAL LAGO, author of Non-Persons: The Exclusion of Migrants in a Global Society (2004), a seminal study of the juridical and mediatic treatment of immigrants in Italy, will join Mediterranean and cultural scholar ALESSANDRA DI MAIO—author of Wor(l)ds of Progress: A Study of Contemporary Migrant Writings (2008)—to discuss political and aesthetic representations of Italy and conditions of migrancy. Attempting to take the pulse of geopolitics in Italy today, the symposium aims to build bridges across disciplines in the increasing privation of institutional ones.
9am-12pm – Melnitz Hall, Star Theater
1pm-8pm – UCLA Royce Hall, Room 314
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