Southern Italy on US screen: cultural boundary-crossings or clichéd images?

Connections between national boundaries and culture still persist even today, in spite of ever-spreading globalization and migration trans-national identities. In Anderson’ seminal text (2003:6) nations themselves are regarded as a sort of cultural metanarrative, a socio-ideological enclosure where people are glued by consensual values and cultural heritage which mark them as a distinct ethic group. But, what happens when national identities and culture-laden elements representing them are transferred and/or depicted outside the socio-cultural cradle in which they originated? In today’s global cultural flow, not only translated texts are influential in the construction of national identities for foreign cultures (Venuti 1998: 67), but mediascapes, -i.e. both the images and electronic and print media via which cultural images are carried (Appadurai 1990,1996), play a fundamental role as well. Drawing both on Social Semiotics (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006, 2001, Van Leeuwen 2005) and Appraisal theory (Bednarek 2010, White 2005; Martin & White 2007), this paper intends to investigate some US filmic representations of Southern Italy and the ‘epistemological commitment’ they demand ( Kress 2010:16). In particular, through the analysis of hit films ranging from The Godfather to Eat, Love and Pray and the stereotyped portrayals of Southern-Italian characters they construe, we aim at evaluating if, and to what extent, such (mis)representations interact and impact with shaping ethnic profiling, conceivably concurring to reinforce US socially-shared ‘psychollages’ (Mancuso 2001, 2003) of Southern-Italian people.