In a world that is made relentlessly more composite and multidimensional, the intersecting of art, cinema, music, theater and literature can help us re-configure rhythmically and synergetically the dissonant and discrete realities in which we are immersed. The mathematical concept of the intersection, or the visual image of a multiple road junction provide us with both a figurative and a conceptual framework for the investigation of how our understanding can be solicited intellectually and artistically by boundary crossing, cooperative practices, and kaleidoscopic experiences.

In recent decades art, literature, music, theater, and cinema in Italy have intersected with the phenomenon of migration, which has propelled the country into the historical, cultural, and artistic dimension of post-coloniality. Directors, artists, writers, performers, and musicians, as well as intellectuals have attempted to represent the new reality and to negotiate innovative ways in which to recover and interpellate its plural voices and contaminated perspectives.

Intersections/Intersezioni 2016, Crossing Italian Borders in Art, Literature, Music, Theater, and Cinema explores the imaginative and idiosyncratic relationship between the arts and the new reality, to reveal how unconventional contacts, exchanges, and relations can implode the limits of the creative process, and expand the horizon by intersecting the familiar with the unfamiliar, the known with the knowable.

The conference organizers welcome comparative and interdisciplinary analysis that challenge conventional representations of migration and develop new contaminated discourses. Italian, Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, Film studies and the the New Realism in philosophy and the arts are welcome theoretical frameworks while perspectives may encompass the literary, the cinematic, Italian-American studies, history, art history, philosophy, anthropology, music, political science, religion, gender studies, and any other relevant discipline.


Possible topics may include but are not limited to the following:

*Music: explorations of the contaminated rhythms of the Mediterranean, especially when their conflation with the sounds of the African continent give rise to multiple and diverse musical forms.

*Literature: Italian Studies, Post-Modernity, Feminist Theory, Ecocritical, Post-Colonial, and Transnational studies and their intersection with migration in cinema, music, and the arts, but also with politics, cultural practices, and socio-economic phenomena (especially the re-negotiation of cultural practices and political discourses).Theoretical intersections can be drawn from the debate on issues involving Globalization and Global/Local/Glocal, but also from the debate on the proliferation of borders, discrimination, and racism. 


*Art: Contemporary trends in art (arte povera, post-structuralism, post-modernism) as they intersect with the reality of the migrant body and its corporeality translated in music, literature and cinema, or transported spatially into architecture and urban studies. 


*Cinema and its Intersections with border crossing as political but also aesthetic research of new forms of expression.


Please send an abstract (1-2 paragraphs) to the attention of the Organizing Committee to: intersections.intersezioni@gmail.com

THE DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS IS: February 15th, 2016