Upcoming lecture on Thursday: the ethnic immigrant in American Cinema

[Syrimis, George]

The Hellenic Studies Program
at Yale University

presents

Yiorgos Kalogeras
Department of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

"Entering through the Golden Door: Cinematic Representations of a Mythical Moment"

Abstract: In representing Southern European emigration to America, cinema has depicted the immigrants' passage as a passage into modernity and citizenship. However, their prospective constitution as U.S.A. citizens is contingent upon the redefinition of their identity in terms of class, gender and race. In Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant (1917) an ironic parallelism is drawn between the Statue of Liberty and the roping off of the future Americans like cattle by the Ellis Island authorities; their eventual establishment in U.S. society can be conceived only if the immigrants are defined as aesthetically interesting ethnics/exotics, subjects to the artist's palette. In 1963, Elia Kazan's America-America represents the immigrant entering the U.S.A. as subject to effective bartering between immigration officials and the white slave driver the immigrant is indentured to. Most significantly, this film associated the immigrant crossing with the establishment of a white identity. More recently, Greek director Pandelis Voulgaris in The Brides (2004) represents entering the U.S.A. by referring back to Chaplin's 1917 short film. Immigration is constituted as an instance of fetishization of the immigrant, in this case a woman. Finally, Italian director Emmanulle Creolese in Nuovomondo (2006) depicts arrival on Ellis Island as a traumatic ordeal of exclusion, a result of scientific racialization, but also as a consequent ironic sublimation by the immigrant of the official discourse of the American Dream.

Thursday, November 19, 5:00 PM
Room 102, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven

 FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

The activities of the Hellenic Studies Program are funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Hellenic Studies at Yale University