This panel aims at exploring the diversified experiences generated by the return home underwent by characters, writers, and filmmakers in the Italian context of the 20th and 21st century. The return home represented a topical theme for the 20th century Italian literature and visual arts, and it has gained a new urgency under the shifting geopolitical reconfiguration of the 21st century.

• What is the significance of home in a time of migrations, displacements, exiles, and uprootedness?
• How does the return reshape one’s own experience of home?
• In what way is the idea of belonging redefined by the return to one’s own home?
• How are local and global scales and relationships negotiated and re-articulated through the experience of the return home?
• How is the idea of home reassessed, exposed, and critiqued through the returns home of fictional characters?
• How is the return home envisioned in the lived experiences of writers and image makers?
• Finally, in what way do literary and cinematic fictions, literary and audiovisual representations, help us to rethink the idea of home beyond any geographical situatedness?

Abstracts from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives are welcome.

Chair: Peter Lesnik (University of Pennsylvania)

Submit abstract to NeMLA web site https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17111 by September 30, 2017 deadline. To submit, you will need a free NeMLA CFP List account at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP.