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Good workers: television documentary, migration and the Italian nation, 1956–1964

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2016

Mark Hayward
Mark Hayward*
Affiliation:
Department of Global Communication, American University of Paris, Paris, France
*
∗ Email: mhayward@aup.fr
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Abstract

This paper examines a series of documentaries produced in the period between 1956 and 1964 that document the activities of Italian migrants around the world (a corpus of more than 100 films and programmes altogether). These films, which record the dedicated and laborious nature of Italians around the globe, play a double role. On the one hand, they serve as a necessary adjunct to the establishment of a ‘labour culture’ in Italy, a central aspect of the compromise between labour unrest and the demands of capital in which the figure of the worker is continually praised. At the same time, they serve to obscure and rewrite the Italian collective memory concerning the legacy of Fascist imperialism and Italian involvement in colonial expansion, in the process recasting the Italian coloniser as the ‘good worker’.

Keywords

migrationtelevision documentarypublic memorymodernisationlabour
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 3 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

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