Global Melodrama ― Nation, Body, and History in Contemporary Film

Melodrama manipulates us to feel deeply about the structures that ground our experience of the world: our bodies, the family, the home, and the nation. For this reason, melodrama is a narrative and aesthetic form employed to sustain the national imagination. Globalization is a phenomenon that has profoundly changed how we live and connect to others, transforming our spatio-temporal parameters. Global Melodrama analyzes the ways in which melodrama addresses this new geopolitical reality and examines how contemporary films ask us to rethink how we organize, and tell stories about, our sense of identity and community. Through case-studies and close readings of films that emerge from different national and aesthetic traditions, Carla Marcantonio demonstrates how global melodramas, far from championing the borderless landscape that the term "global" might index, map new temporal, spatial, and embodied territories.

Carla Marcantonio is an assistant professor of English and Film and Media Studies. Her articles and essays have been published in such journals as Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Cineaste, as well as multiple edited books. She received her PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University and her MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder.