1,721,165 research outputs found
Exposing the ‘Ndrangheta. The multimodal representation of Italian MafiaS as a stratified construct
No full textExposing the ‘Ndrangheta. The multimodal representation of Italian MafiaS as a stratified construct
The 2007 gruesome killings of Italian mafiosi in Duisburg, Germany, marked a major change in the perception and the awareness of the ‘Ndrangheta, the crime syndicate thriving in the tip of Italy, Calabria. Until then, there was very little knowledge of this criminal organization, which was hardly distinguished from the different criminal groups active in Italy (Gratteri/Nicaso 2007).
2007 also marked a historical turning point in the discursive representation of the Italian Mafia(S) in European media. From a linguistic perspective, our study focuses on the change, following 2007, in discursive strategies employed by Mafia experts in naming, defining and popularizing the emerging reality of the ‘Ndrangheta, in line with the reflections on evolving recontextualized (Fairclough 2010) concepts in the Discourse-historical Approach (Wodak 2010; Reisigl/Wodak 2009).
The study examines a 2007 BBC documentary presented by a British expert on the ‘Ndrangheta with a view to investigating:
- instances of multimodal interdiscursivity in relation to references to the Mafia derived from other genres (e.g. news reports, investigative journalism, literature, history books, picture movies, footage, police recordings) (Jewitt 2009, Dickie 2012);
- strategies of ‘singularization’ (Wodak 2010) emerging in the process of naming and of contructing the identity of this crime syndicate, which displays autonomous practices, codes of conduct and sets of beliefs in contrast with the more widely known ‘Cosa Nostra’ and ‘Camorra’.
Both dimensions shed light on the emergence of multimodal traits in the genre under investigation (Garzone/Catenaccio/Degano 2012; Bathia/Bhatia 2004, Bhatia 2010, 2012), which seems to appropriate features of ‘embedded journalism’
Cultural transfer and bilingualism in the documentary '389 Miles: Living the Border' by Luis Carlos Davis
Full text linkThe use of multiple languages in movies often involves negative stereotyping of characters belonging to a minority represented in those films. This is the case with some Hollywood films in which Spanish is associated with exotic or dangerous characters, confirming persistently the dominant position of the English language. In the documentary 389 Miles: Living the Border (2009) the linguistic and cultural impact of migration is seen from quite a different perspective. Whereas most of the documentaries dealing with the Mexican-American border are predominantly in English, possibly with Spanish subtitles, or mainly in Spanish with English subtitles, in 389 Miles both languages are used equally. The narrator tells the story in English, but he uses both languages in the interviews. There are also a few characters who switch from English to Spanish. The aim of this article is threefold: in a first instance, it seeks to examine the documentary with the use of some basic concepts of Polysystem Theory. The second objective is to explore language diversity. In a third instance, this article aims to shed more light on two powerful Mexican symbols: viz. the Virgin of Guadalupe and the wrestler mask. The final objective is to find out how bilingualism in documentaries changes our perception on other cultures, border crossing and migration.edition: Special issue: Multilingualism and Cultural Transferstatus: Publishe
Translating the real to the reel : the representation of Latinx migration in documentaries
No full textThe present doctoral study aims to chart the representation of Latinx migration to the US in documentary films. As US immigration policy grew increasingly restrictive over the course of the 20th century, public discourse became more antagonizing towards Latinx immigrants. Hence, there is a wealth of literature on stereotyping and antagonizing media frames of Latinxs. There is little information, however, on attempts by the media to approach social issues such as Latinx migration from a less prejudiced angle. The present study addresses this knowledge gap by focusing on documentary depictions of Latinx (im)migrants.
This study draws from Translation Studies to map out the route of real-life stories on Latinx migration to the documentary reel. By positing that documentaries and translations are prompted by the same oscillation between reality and representation to make authenticity claims, the study proposes to view documentaries as forms of translation. Such a stance allows for the documentary maker to take center stage and become a documentator: a documentarist-cum-translator with an agency to intervene in the transfer process from the real to the reel.
The corpus of this study consists of documentaries on Latinx migration to the US that were broadcast between 1988 and 2018 on the PBS series POV, the first and longest-running showcase of independent nonfiction films in the US. Looking at these documentaries as translations, the study zones in on their contexts, agents, discourses, and practices - four basic factors of translation. Defined in function of the study's aim to chart how independent documentary makers, as documentators, translate stories on Latinx migration from the real to the reel, "context" alludes to the properties of the target structure in which the transferred products were meant to circulate; "agents" are understood to be documentarists-cum-translators with an agency defined by their habitus; "discourses" stand for the documentators' ideological choices in their documentary target texts; and the "practices" are the concrete translation decisions that these agents made in the said texts
Remediating photography in second-generation graphic narratives: haptic imaginaries and genealogies
Full text linkIn this article we explore the complexities of using intermediality in a subgenre of the graphic novel: the graphic memoir. More specifically, our corpus includes three second-generation graphic memoirs that all incorporate reproductions of (family) photographs, personal documents, and archival material: Palacinche: Storia di un’esule fiumana (2012), by Caterina Sansone and Alessandro Tota, Mendel’s Daughter: A Memoir (2006), by Martin Lemelman, and Two Cents Plain: My Brooklyn Boyhood (2010), by the same author. Although the phenomenon of intermediality is often approached from a semiotic perspective, our analysis reveals that this approach does not suffice to capture the complexities of intermediality within the second-generation graphic memoirs included in our corpus. Drawing on material approaches to visual culture and photography as developed in the domain of anthropology, we address the haptic engagement and creative investment through which the intermedial configurations eventually produce the affective attachments that the narrators seek to establish and share with the world. Thanks to these haptic attachments, the nostalgia evoked in the narratives is converted into a present feeling of affective connection with, and belonging to, a recovered family history. To that aim, the visual dimension of the three graphic narratives is haptically broadened so as to restore paths toward memory, thus welcoming a felt, and truly embodied, experience of other people’s history and past
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