Anna Botta  (Smith College)
The Geopolitics of Mobility Within the European Union: New Theoretical Approaches Beyond Postcolonial Studies

I believe that the Anglophone/Francophone divide in charting new directions in the field of postcolonial studies proves to be a quite inadequate theoretical horizon in the study of contemporary Europe and its migrational fluxes both from the South (from postcolonial countries) and from the East (after the 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall). Analysing the geopolitics of mobility within the European Union and its contradictory aspects, I intend to show how both the notions of border and national identity have been redefined in ways that cannot be fully accounted for by postcolonial theoretical paradigms.

Drawing on theoretical works by Etienne Balibar, Jacqueline Bhabha, Riva Kastoryano, Liisa Malkki and Saskia Sassen, I analyse two contemporary films, which are about displaced people in a world of transient identities. Bolshe Vita (1995), written and directed by the Hungarian director Ibolya Fekete, through a mix of documentary clips and feature film material, documents the euphoric period following the official opening of the Eastern borders and the disillusion that followed. The film tells the story of three illegal immigants from Russia and the women they meet in Budapest and shows how smuggling people has become a lucrative traffic in what Saskia Sassen refers to as "border-fee" Europe.

Going Back Home (Tornando a casa)(2001), written and directed by the Italian director Vincenzo Marra, shows the brotherhood between poor Italian fishermen who are forced by local mafia and shortage of fish to fish in extraterritorial waters and illigal immigrants from Africa who cross the same waters in the desperate attempt to land in Italy. As Liisa Malkki writes: "In the moment of transfiguring the national into the transnational, the EU can only exist by way of a state-sanctioned traffic in illegal aliens and their displacement through commodification."