No. 9 (2015): Listen to Me with Your Eyes: Migrant Writing and Cinema in the Americas

This volume focuses on the language of films and its special relationship with literature in the Americas. In order to identify the similarities and differences between these two art forms, the investigation is approached from multiple directions and the contributions focus on intertwined aspects. Semiotic and narratological analyses, for instance, reveal references to cinema in literary works by migrant writers, while the study of polygraphic works stresses the activity of migrant film directors who often experiment with both narrative means. In other cases, the narratives of films and of literary texts are compared; diachronic exegesis of single films, currents and movements which have become established in one or more places is also offered. Topics like memory, poverty, exclusion and marginality are addressed not only through literature and films but also through music, which is equally important in the process of dissipating scenarios of individual and collective crisis and personal dilemmas within of globalized societies. What emerges from this multifaceted and extremely interesting field of investigation is ultimately the same urgent and distressing need to search for identity, which is shared by old and new migrants alike, in Canada, the US, Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, or in any other area of Central and South America, especially in Argentina.