This volume offers new approaches to considering Italy’s traumatic experiences through a wide array of media, including film, documentaries, docufiction, websites, YouTube videos, advertisements, newspapers, and literature, that have not yet been fully analyzed. It looks at the trauma inflicted on Italians not, simply, as national or cultural traumas but, rather, as the creation/identification of subnational and transnational communities shaped by these trauma cases. The term “subnational”, or “transnational”, community is used mostly in reference to human beings, as they form those communities; however, they are also connected to a specific place, namely Italy. In addition, whereas “things” cannot become traumatized, this book also considers “living things,” such as the environment and the nature, which may create further trauma(s) for people.

This volume offers new approaches to considering Italy's traumatic experiences through a wide array of media, including film, documentaries, docufiction, websites, YouTube videos, advertisements, newspapers, and literature, that have not yet been fully analyzed. It looks at the trauma inflicted on Italians not, simply, as national or cultural traumas but, rather, as the creation/identification of subnational and transnational communities shaped by these trauma cases. The term "subnational", or "transnational", community is used mostly in reference to human beings, as they form those communities; however, they are also connected to a specific place, namely Italy. In addition, whereas "things" cannot become traumatized, this book also considers "living things," such as the environment and the nature, which may create further trauma(s) for people.

Film has taken a powerful position alongside the global environmental movement, from didactic documentaries to the fantasy pleasures of commercial franchises. This book investigates in particular film’s complex role in representing ecological traumas. Eco-trauma cinema represents the harm we, as humans, inflict upon our natural surroundings, or the injuries we sustain from nature in its unforgiving iterations. The term encompasses both circumstances because these seemingly distinct instances of ecological harm are often related, and even symbiotic: the traumas we perpetuate in an ecosystem through pollution and unsustainable resource management inevitably return to harm us. Contributors to this volume engage with eco-trauma cinema in its three general forms: accounts of people who are traumatized by the natural world, narratives that represent people or social processes which traumatize the environment or its species, and stories that depict the aftermath of ecological catastrophe. The films they examine represent a central challenge of our age: to overcome our disavowal of environmental crises, to reflect on the unsavoury forces reshaping the planet's ecosystems, and to restructure the mechanisms responsible for the state of the earth.

Discussing a variety of independent and experimental Italian films, this book gives voice to a critcically neglected form of Italian cinema. By examining the work of directors such as Marinella Pirelli, Mirko Locatelli and Cesrae Zavattini, the book defines, inspects and studies the cinematic panorama of Italy through a new lens. It thereby explores the character of independent films and their related practices within the Italian historical, cultural and cinematic landscape.

This volume is first consistent effort to systematically analyze the features and consequences of colonial repatriation in comparative terms, examining the trajectories of returnees in six former colonial countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal). Each contributor examines these cases through a shared cultural sociology frame, unifying the historical and sociological analyses carried out in the collection. More particularly, the book strengthens and improves one of the most important and popular current streams of cultural sociology, that of collective trauma. Using a comparative perspective to study the trajectories of similarly traumatized groups in different countries allows for not only a thick description of the return processes, but also a thick explanation of the mechanisms and factors shaping them. Learning from these various cases of colonial returnees, the authors have been able to develop a new theoretical framework that may help cultural sociologists to explain why seemingly similar claims of collective trauma and victimhood garner respect and recognition in certain contexts, but fail in others.

We know a lot about the directors and stars of Italian cinema's heyday, from Roberto Rossellini to Sophia Loren. But what do we know about the Italian audiences that went to see their films? Based on the AHRC-funded project 'Italian Cinema Audiences 1945-60', Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy draws upon the rich data collected by the project team (160 video interviews and 1000+ written questionnaires gathered from Italians aged 65 and over; archival material related to cinema distribution, exhibition and programming, box-office figures, and critical discussions of cinema from film journals and popular magazines of the period). For the first time, cinema's role in everyday Italian life, and its affective meaning when remembered by older people, are enriched with industrial analyses of the booming Italian film sector of the period, as well as contextual data from popular and specialized magazines.