Crossing the Atlantic to Meet the Nation: The Emigration Ship in Mignonette’s Songs and Crialese’s Nuovomondo
Crossing the Atlantic to Meet the Nation: The Emigration Ship in Mignonette’s Songs and Crialese’s Nuovomondo
The topic of voyages is explored in this first chapter through visual and oral materials in which the emigrants’ regional affiliations espouse an in-progress national formation project during trans-national travels toward “America,” at once a real and imaginary place. Songs made popular by the Queen of the Emigrants, the diva-singer Gilda Mignonette who mixed a traditional Neapolitan repertoire with dramatic songs on emigration and colonial anthems, are read next to Emanuele Crialese’s film Nuovomondo (Golden Door 2006), which foregrounds the role of the ship for the leaving, traveling, and arriving migrants at the turn of the century. In these texts, the pre-occupied space under discussion is the ship, a floating social microcosm in which national fractures and international dreams co-exist on a simultaneously dividing and uniting ocean. The preoccupation over the condition of the emigrants that the ship hosts prompts different reactions in these authors, in turn defining different perceptions and figurations of emigration and consequently a different map of the Italian nation’s formation.
Keywords: Emanuele Crialese, emigration, Golden Door, Italy, Mignonette, migrant songs, Nuovomondo, ship, United States
Fordham Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
