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The essays address the cultural politics of our global present. They offer a contribution towards keeping the spirit of utopia alive by practicing it, promoting that the struggle for liberation may continue in an era whose landscape is not inhabited by the presence of great utopian constructs

This collection of essays presents a study of migration cultures in the contemporary Mediterranean with a particular focus on Italy as a point of migratory convergence and pressure. It investigates different experiences of, and responses to, sea crossings, borders and checkpoints, cultural proximity and distance, race, ethnicity and memory, along with creative responses to the same. In dialogic and complementary interaction, the essays explore violence centring on race as the major determining factor. The book further submits that the interrogation of racialized categories represents different kinds of critical response and resistance, which involve both political struggle and day-to-day survival and coexistence. Following the praxis of cultural and postcolonial studies, the essays focus on the present but draw indispensable insight from past connections and heritage as well as offering prognoses for the future. The ambitious aim of this collection is to identify some useful lines of thought and action that could help us to think outside intricacy, isolation and defensiveness, which characterize most of the public official reactions to migration today

The book is an interdisciplinary conversation on utopia clustered around cultural and communication practises that are presented as political and ethical projects for today. It raises questions for intellectual work and invites a revision of the forms of knowledge production for the development of critical thinking.

This essay investigates the construction of a hostile environment for refugees and asylum seekers in Italy in recent years. Rather than a consistent set of practices, the construction of the Italian hostile environment should be interpreted as a series of uneven responses to increasing migration from the Mediterranean South, and of unsystematic concrete procedures for migration control, developed according to diverse local contexts. These specific hostile environment constructions obfuscate dehumanising practices. In this context, however, forms of civic engagement offer important examples of resistance, which we aim at bringing to the foreground in the first part of this essay. The second part addresses imaginative and artistic responses to the Italian hostile environment by focusing on the stage. In particular, Sicilian playwright Lina Prosa's The Shipwreck Trilogy will be taken as case study. Representing immigration from the triple perspective of the sea voyage, the mountain limbo, and the existential "horizontal shipwreck" caused by negligent legislation, the Trilogy moves away from explicit humanitarianism or advocacy and consolidated patterns of the "right kind" of refugee story. It celebrates, instead, migrant agency and re-mythologises the figure of the migrant as a bearer of knowledges, aspirations, affects, memories, claims, relationalities, and better stories.

This collection of essays explores the idea of the efficacy, limitations and future of Cultural Studies as a theoretical and methodological approach to the analysis of recent crisis phenomena in Europe. The volume spans a wide range of topics, including: theoretical and critical approaches to the stability of the EU as a political and economic union of its 28 member states; the (not only) recent flow of refugees into Europe and other countries, and the refugee tragedies off the coast of Lampedusa; the resurgence of far-right, anti-Islam political groups throughout Europe; the negotiation of affect and crisis phenomena in literary texts; and the question of media and refugees. These and other pressing issues are addressed and discussed from a variety of historical, political, pedagogical, gender, media and aesthetic perspectives, as encompassed in Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Literatures.