Queering Cosmopolitan Futurity: Sailing into the Unknown in Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma

ABSTRACT

In response to this special issue’s call for thinking of new ways of living collectively in the present and the future, this article brings queer theories of temporality into conversation with cosmopolitanism. It does so through a reading of the 2011 film Terraferma. Set on the small Mediterranean island of Linosa, Terraferma follows an Italian family who rescue migrants they find stranded in the sea, taking two of the migrants into their home, a pregnant woman named Sara and her son, Omar. What follows is an examination of the relationship between ethics, kinship, and futurity that is also a critique of the heteronormative ways we usually imagine political organisation. As we watch the family help Sara give birth, and then attempt to sneak her and her children off the island, we see them prioritise her future over their own. The film, therefore, invites viewers to think about our ethical obligations to each other by embracing a kind of non-futurity that is both radical and queer.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• sexuality
• cosmopolitanism
• reproduction
• migration
• futurism
• film
• temporality
• queer

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Heather Latimer is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, in Kelowna, Canada.

Notes

1 See Appiah 2006, Calhoun 2008, Cheah 2006, and Mignolo 2000, for instance.

2 For more on critical cosmopolitanisms see Glick Schiller and Irving 2015, Gunew 2017, and Kent and Tomsky 2017.

3 For the links between nationalism and sexual politics see McClintock 1995, Stoler 2002, and Yuval-Davis 1997.