G. (Giuseppe) Fidotta, PhD

I am currently working on two book projects.

The first, provisionally titled Antimafia Media, is a media-ethnographic study of cinematic mafia imaginaries and their impact upon both the local culture industries (tourism, media, and cultural heritage) and antimafia politics (institutional and grasssroots) in Western Sicily. By examining the work of a variety of cultural actors in and out former capital of the mafia Palermo, it maintains that the local culture industry's re-elaborations of mafia history and mythology enabled the emergence of the easily accessible and commodified movie-made mafia imaginary underpinning the current surge of mafia-themed cultural production. Through a wide range of cases ethnographically documented, Antimafia Media illuminates largely unknown forms of cultural production that nonetheless have a massive impact over Sicily's social and economic life. Moreover, it explores the ambivalent complicity of the hegemonic faction of the antimafia movement toward mafia-themed cultural production, arguing for a reassessment of the entanglements of activism, social imaginary, media making, and cultural politics in light of the ongoing economic recession and social distress affecting the region. The broader goal of the project is to push forward an intimate dialogue between film and media studies, cultural studies, and anthropology through the examination of the lived experiences of militancy and cultural production.

The second project, provisionally titled Migration and the Circuits of Cinema: Toward a Mediterranean Imaginary, intends to outline the contours of a still-developing migrant film culture in Sicily, one of the world's key migration hubs. In a context where issues of migration and integration have saturated the cultural sphere to such an extent that hardly any product or large-scale initiative associated with the island can shy away from addressing or at least alluding to them, cinema more than any other medium has been pivotal in registering these shifts while promoting new imaginaries of citizenship, solidarity, and hospitality meant to reactivate Mediterranean transcultural affinities partially obliterated in the name of the European integration process. The project explores the material articulations of these imaginaries by attending to three main sites of a film culture—namely, the text, the set, and the festival—in order to expose the constitutive connections between production and distribution networks, activism, and cultural policies.