The Somatechnics of Transcultural Communication: Transcending Boundaries and Borders in All in My Family and The Farewell

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we stage a critical discussion between somatechnics and transcultural communication studies to push the latter field beyond existing paradigms and illustrate the usefulness of somatechnics to think through (embodied) transculturality. By means of example, we analyze Hao Wu’s short documentary All in My Family (2019) and Lulu Wang’s feature film The Farewell (2019) through the lens of somatechnics and argue that these films offer an important opportunity to consider their protagonists’ contextually specific lived experiences in relation to both Western and Chinese idea(l)s of the family, parenthood, and sexuality. This is not to suggest that we juxtapose the global with the local or the West with the non-West in our analysis as two separate, identifiable categories. Rather, following Natalie Oswin (2006), we wish to examine how these films, as contemporary popular forms of transcultural communication, enable a critical discussion of “the West and non-West in all their complexity as the transnational, transcultural spaces that they are” (2006, p. 788). Approached this way, we hope to show how the films under discussion exemplify a range of somatechnologies; that is, bodies, which in the process of transcultural (un)becoming-with, materialize in a glocalized space where the global and local, West and East mutually (in)form each other and have become inextricable. In other words, our analysis of these films demonstrates how somatechnics may provide a novel way to think through the varied ways in which transculturality is both embodied and bodied forth.