Humanities

The article explores Roberta Torre’s film Sud Side Stori (2000), an extravagant Italian re-vision of both Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story (1961) set in the Sicilian city of Palermo. In the film, which combines neo-realist cinematographic techniques with the artificial style of the musical, Shakespeare’s “star-cross’d lovers” become Toni Giulietto, a lousy local rock singer, and Romea Wacoubo, a beautiful Nigerian prostitute who falls in love with him when she sees him standing on his balcony. The interracial passion between Toni and Romea exacerbates pre-existing ethnic conflicts. It is opposed not only by the two lovers’ “households”—respectively, Toni’s three ugly aunties and Romea’s closest friends Mercutia and Baldassarra—but also by the whole Nigerian immigrant community, including those African characters who run the racket of prostitution, and, more indirectly, by the local Mafia. The article argues that Torre’s film is a re-iteration which “produces” the “textual body” of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as an ensemble of spectral / textual fragments which remain to be translated into Italian, and thus draws attention to translation as an interminable process. It adds that these fragments are often re-mediated, de-contextualized and forced to cohabit with the language of the body, music and dance, or even with the conventions of silent films, in ways which are reciprocally illuminating. The article also shows that in Torre’s film “Shakespearecentric” concerns—what counts as Shakespeare, which includes the multifarious ways in which Romeo and Juliet has been recycled in contemporary global media culture—and “Shakespeareccentric” concerns (Richard Burt) repeatedly interact with one another. Particularly significant in this respect is the fact that the film often brings an allegorical dimension to bear on the issues of migration and hospitality it continually foregrounds, so that the response to the alterity of the body of the “other” / foreigner / migrant (i.e., especially Romea but also the similarly displaced “native” Toni Giuletto) becomes inextricably intertwined with the question of the incorporation of the “foreignness” of Shakespeare, a “textual body” which itself migrates from an Anglophone to a non-Anglophone context.

The paper will offer a reading of John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses (2010), a 90-minute experimental feature film that has been defined as " one of the most vital and original artistic responses to the subject of immigration that British cinema has ever produced " (Mitchell). It will focus on the multifarious ways in which the film makes the " canonical " literary material that it incorporates, including Shakespeare, interact with rarely seen archival material from the BBC regarding the experience of Caribbean and South Asian immigrants in 1950s and 1960s Britain. It will argue that through this interaction the familiarity of Western " canonical " literature represents itself as an uncanny landscape haunted by other stories, as a language that is already in itself the " language of the other " (Derrida). In particular, it will claim that Shakespearean fragments are often used in an idiosyncratic way, and they repeatedly resonate with some of the most fundamental ethical and political issues of the film, such as the question of England as " home " and migration. The paper will also argue that the decontextualization and recontextualization of these fragments makes them re-emerge as part of an interrogation of the mediality of the medium, an interrogation that also offers insights into the circulation of Shakespeare in the contemporary mediascape. John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses (2010) is a 90-minute multi-layered, experimental feature film that has been shown at major film festivals (including the Sundance Film Festival, the London Film festival, and the Biennale in Venice) and in gallery spaces (such as the MoMA in New York) to much critical acclaim. 1 In a volume of the Directory of World Cinema dedicated to contemporary British cinema, it is defined as " one of the most vital and original * University of Salerno mcalbi@unisa.it 1 The film began as a 40-minute gallery piece called Mnemosyne.

music shifts to a more dramatic tone, an African American character called William Ward (Danny Glover) reads the following lines from Romeo and Juliet to his wife, a Native American woman called Venus Redhawk (Tantoo Cardinal), who is lying in bed and about to die: