Vetri Nathan - Böcker

Historically a source of emigrants to Northern Europe and the New World, Italy has rapidly become a preferred destination for immigrants from the global South. Life in the land of la dolce vita has not seemed so sweet recently, as Italy struggles with the cultural challenges caused by this surge in immigration.Marvelous Bodies by Vetri Nathan explores thirteen key full-length Italian films released between 1990 and 2010 that treat this remarkable moment of cultural role reversal through a plurality of styles. In it, Nathan argues that Italy sees itself as the quintessential internal Other of Western Europe, and that this subalternity directly influences its cinematic response to immigrants, Europe’s external Others.In framing his case to understand Italy’s cinematic response to immigrants, Nathan first explores some basic questions: Who exactly is the Other in Italy? Does Italy’s own past partial alterity affect its present response to its newest subalterns? Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s writings and Italian cinematic history, Nathan then posits the existence of marvelous bodies that are momentarily neither completely Italian nor completely immigrant. This ambivalence of forms extends to the films themselves, which tend to be generic hybrids. The persistent curious presence of marvelous bodies and a pervasive generic hybridity enact Italy’s own chronic ambivalence that results from its presence at the cultural crossroads of the Mediterranean.

As lands burn, oceans boil, species go extinct and cultural conflicts multiply, Our Multispecies Futures urgently calls for a paradigm-shift in humanity’s relationship to life on Earth.This timely volume argues that the delusion of human exceptionalism stokes colonial and hierarchical relationships with our animal, plant, fungal, and microbial companions. It undertakes multi-scalar explorations of life, ranging from vast oceanic currents down to intricate psychic mechanisms that fuel our personal fears, desires and fantasies to reveal both the damage of this delusion and the rewards of overcoming it. We discover how multispecies harm is amplified by the digital revolution which has rapidly accelerated opportunities to control life (both human and non) for profit. The book proposes the Cybercene as a new framework to study this moment, where digital ‘realities’ and representations are rapidly transforming identities and substituting the value of actual bodies and living habitats.Rather than focusing on doomsday scenarios, however, readers are invited to explore pragmatic alternative pathways for ecocultural care and kinship. We embark on a global journey, mapping diverse entangled lives—from mini-foxes and mysterious underground fungal networks to seemingly sentient chatbots and the American Bison. Through these stories, the book suggests ways to jam and ‘glitch’ capture-and-control practices, and how to care differently for our multispecies kin.Accessible to a broad audience, Our Multispecies Futures serves as both an introduction to the young field of Multispecies Studies and a manual showcasing new interdisciplinary research methods like multispecies thick-mapping and naturalcultural discourse analysis. It offers a vital guide for reimagining a shared future.