Le intensità variabili del terrore: migranti e terroristi nel mediascape contemporaneo

Terrorist and migrant are probably the major phobias of contemporary Western societies, the two figures that embody the fears of the present time the most. Media are crowded by tragedies associating with the landings of migrants and videos documenting attacks, beheadings and destructions of artistic heritage. What are the criteria of visibility of these images? Which iconographic and imaginary domains do they recall? What are the effects and passions produced on the public? Migratory waves and terrorist attacks have been interpreted by media through distinct rhetoric, and yet enclosed in neighboring discursive fields, whose “boundaries” are marked by the different passional gradations (from fear to terror) that these would produce in public opinion. Starting from an audiovisual corpus consisting of the representations broadcasted by Italian media in the period coinciding with the attacks occurred in November 2015 in Paris, the paper will evaluate the theoretical and heuristic effectiveness of two specific ways of creating fear involving migrants and terrorists, that we propose to define respectively “low” and “high” intensity. The rhetoric of invasion and preventive security is based on the gradual threat of a looming terror. This passional gradualness is also supported by implicit references to an epidemiological imaginary that originates from Hollywood cinema and is rooted around two “conceptual characters” – the zombie and the clone – and two genres – horror and science fiction. Forms of representation and passional variations will therefore be the focus around which the essay will articulate a reflection – related to a specific but nevertheless generalizable corpus – on the images of migrants and terrorists, two “extreme” forms of life that continually challenge our relationship with the Otherness.