About

Dott. Goffredo Polizzi is a PhD Student in the Department of Italian Studies, exploring migration in post-colonial literature and cinema. He is jointly supervised by Jennifer Burns at Warwick and Rita Wilson at Monash University in Australia.

Research interests

Dott. Polizzi's PhD Thesis is entitled Re-imagining the Italian South: Subjectivity and Migration in Contemporary Literature and Cinema. The thesis aims at reframing and rethinking the concept of subjectivity and national identity in contemporary Italy. It will do so by drawing from postcolonial and feminist approaches, with a special focus on the relation between colonialism, the "southern question", emigration from and to Italy. The scope is to highlight the importance of gender, race, sexuality and class as co-constitutive in the process of national subjectification and identity formation, and therefore creating new venues for alternative identities and more inclusive forms of citizenship.

This research aims to answer how literary and cinematic representations of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nationhood, sustain or run counter to the process of “othering” of the Italian South on one hand and to processes of marginalization of migrants on the other. It also intends to describe the kinds of subjectivity that emerge from the works of contemporary writers and filmakers who have looked at the south with a transnational awareness.

• Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema
  
• Cultural Translation
  
• Migrant Writing in Italian
• Postcolonial Studies
• Feminist and Queer Studies