ABSTRACT
Lamerica, a narrative film set in Albania yet famously about Italy's histories of colonial migration, has provoked a wide variety of responses. The reading of Lamerica that follows divided response as a point of departure to consider the tensions among the film's visual and ideological economies of racialized contact, contagion and immunization in the context of global mass migration. This chapter draws on political philosopher Roberto Esposito's theorization of an 'immunitary paradigm', which gained increasing symbolic and material influence after the fall of communism in 1989: It is precisely the breaking down of the great real and symbolic Berlin Wall that caused many small walls to go up and that transformed and perverted the very idea of community into a besieged fortress. The chapter explores the biopolitical unity of Italians that is purportedly threatened by Albanian immigration as an invasion, or a contagious threat, and which Amelio attempts to critique, is nevertheless affirmed in the figures of Gino and Michele.
