Diasporic Cinema Research Articles

“Abhi Toh Main Jawan Hoon” (For I am forever young): Reflections on the agentic cinematic presence of Zohra Sehgal in British Indian films

ABSTRACT Representations of older women in film and media have reiterated the negative stereotypes of age-induced incapacitation and loss of voice and agency. However, actor Zohra Sehgal, hailed as the “grand old lady of Bollywood”, re-engages with the normative construct of the passive/submissive screen characterization of an older female. Sehgal’s remarkable performances in The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Bhaji on the Beach (1993), and Bend It Like Beckham (2002) highlight the silenced realities of older women within the diasporic space in terms of desire, autonomy, and choice. In British cinema, where the subjectivities of South Asian older individuals (particularly women) were seldom acknowledged, Sehgal’s on-screen presence challenged and overturned marginalization based on age and ethnicity. Through the paradigm of active/successful ageing, this article argues that the politics of gendered representation and ageing have been recontextualized in British Indian diasporic films to reflect on a positive embodiment of Indian older women.

Sensing and self: a haptic ‘look’ at the aesthetics of women’s labour in contemporary Maghrebi and Maghrebi-French diasporic cinema

ABSTRACT This article expands on an ongoing dialogue about representations of female protagonists’ sensual and embodied experiences in Francophone North African cinema scholarship. It examines the dynamic cinematographic styles of contemporary Maghrebi French filmmakers Abdellatif Kechiche, Nadia El Fani, Leila Kilani and Houda Benyamina, asserting that they create a multisensory connection with the viewer that disrupts the underlying unequal power dynamic between film viewer and the Maghrebi woman’s body. This article places labour practices as the loci of analysis, as these examples of quotidian life represent a microcosm of protagonists’ participation in larger social and economic frameworks. First, it looks at the role of embodied labour in strengthening a protagonist’s connection to her community in Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet/The Secret of the Grain (2007) and El Fani’s Bedwin Hacker (2003). Then, it turns to labour practices in Kilani’s Sur la planche/On the Edge (2011) and Benyamina’s Divines (2016) that isolate and disconnect the protagonist from her community and her body. This article concludes that it is the distinctly multisensory style used by all four directors that centres their protagonists’ physical, lived experiences while challenging the viewer not to merely watch them passively, but to engage in a dynamic, empathetic relationship with the body onscreen.

Diasporic Cinema: The Representation of Immigrants in Post-2000 German Films

Migrant laborers began coming to Germany in the 1960’s and caused various transformations in Germany’s demographic and cultural structure. This migration movement has been addressed and represented on the silver screen multiple times, making cinema one of the most important mass communication devices of the 21st century. This study examines how diaspora directors have approached migration in cinema after 2000 and analyzes the diasporic elements in Turkish-German cinema along with fundamental motivations and dynamics. To examine labor migration in cinema from a historical perspective, changes in migrant representations in German cinema until the 2000s are also discussed. Yasemin Şamdereli‘s 2011 film „Wilkommen in Deutschland“ (Welcome to Germany), Feo Aladağ‘s 2010 film „Die Fremde“ (When We Leave), and Fatih Akın‘s 2017 film „Aus dem Nichts“ (In the Fade) are analyzed using Hofstede’s “Cultural Onion” method and the sociological film analysis method.

Stories about Somewhere Else: Mobility and ‘Spatial Others’ in Hong Kong Cinema

ABSTRACT As a migrant city, Hong Kong has produced numerous diasporic films that portray physical mobility and fluid identity as the city’s cultural style. This cultural picture has changed since the 2000s with the rise of localism. As the debate about localism has grown heated, the concepts of mobility and fluidity have seemingly become obsolete. Many Hong Kongers have emigrated to other countries due to the changes in the contemporary political climate, which urges us to read these films in a new context. This article focuses on the works of Wong Kar-wai and Ann Hui, who have consistently made films about journeys and ‘spatial others’. By analysing Wong’s In the Mood for Love (2000) and The Grandmaster (2013), and Hui’s Song of the Exile (1990) and The Golden Era (2014), I illustrate how these films construct a local identity in relation to mobility and why they offer new insights into the debate about Hong Kong’s contemporary culture. Bringing these films into dialogue with the localist discourses, I argue that mobility should be reconsidered a crucial component in the construction of local culture and identity in modern-day Hong Kong.

Hybrid Indo-Trinidadian identities and tasty food: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of ‘Doubles with Slight Pepper’

Abstract The purpose of the proposed paper – which places itself within the field of Postcolonial Critical Discourse Studies (see Esposito, E. (2021). Politics, ethnicity and the postcolonial nation – a critical analysis of political discourse in the Caribbean. John Benjamins Publishing Company) – is to analyse the multi-semiotic practices contributing to the characterisation of the protagonist of Trinidadian short-film “Doubles with Slight Pepper” as a cinematic portrayal of the hybrid Indo-Trinidadian identity. By way of a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading images: the grammar of visual design. Routledge, London, Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse. The modes and media of contemporary communications discourse. Hodder Educations, London, Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: the grammar of visual design, 2nd ed. London: Routledge; O’Halloran, K.L. (2004). Multimodal discourse analysis. Continuum, London), the study aims to cast light on the strategies exploited by the filmmaker (1) to depict the protagonist (Dhani) as an in-betweener whose ambitions are inhibited by his social status stemming from generations of subjugation and misuse by colonialists; and (2) to promote Indo-Trinidadian cultural specificities. Following an introduction to the key concept of individual and collective identity with a focus on Trinidad and Tobago, and an outline of diasporic cinema as applied to the Indo-Trinidadian community, the Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis is carried out on the verbal, non-verbal, and visual sub-corpora gathered up in sequences according to the main three identitarian traits exhibited in the short-film: ‘religion/folklore’, ‘food’, and ‘lineage’.

Creating the right environment for tackling disinformation in the classroom

Teacher’s Social Media Profile as Seen by Participants of Educational Relations A. Adaskina, I. Voronkova .............................................................................................................. Media-Communicative Occupational Guidance Based on the Platform of Online Game N. Anashkina, M. Shmatko, S. Anashkina …………………………………………………………………...….. Importance of Media Literacy for Political Communication in Russia: A Case of Student Community I. Bykov, M. Medvedeva ………………………………………………………………………………………………..… Russian Topic on Euronews and Media Manipulations A. Fedorov ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Media Competence of Modern Students: Problems and Possibilities of Its Formation in the System of Higher Education E. Frolova, O. Rogach ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… A Course in Argumentation in Journalism in the Master’s Curriculum: Using Russian Popular Science Magazines as Case Studies V. Golubev, A. Teplyashina, E. Abramova, I. Ibragimov ……………………………………………………… COVID-19 Pandemic and Lockdown on Education: Proposing an ‘e-Pedagogy on the Go’ System as an Alternative e-Teaching and Learning Platform During and in the Post-Pandemic Era A.M. Ibrahim, S. Uba, A.M. Abubakar ………………………………………………………………………………. Media Crowdsourcing and Media Crowdfunding in the Digital Environment and Media Education Practices T. Kaminskaya, O. Erokhina ……………………………………………………………………………………………. Diasporic Identities and their Representation through Cinema: An Analysis of Diasporic Film through South Asian Cinemas S. Kayal, R. Saha …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Media Manipulation in the Modern French and Swiss Press A. Levitskaya ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Media Space as a Regulator of the Global Transformation of Communicative Interaction A. Shuneyko, O. Chibisova ………………………………………………………………………………………………. Analysis of Media Manipulation Influences as a Way to Develop Media Competence of Future Teachers (On COVID-19 Media Texts) M. Tselykh, A. Levitskaya ……………………………………………………………………………………………… Usage of Media Products by Teachers: Pedagogical Potential, Expertise and Implementation Yu. Tyunnikov, M. Maznichenko, I. Kazakov, Y. Yurchenko ……………………………………………… Cherkessk – Moscow – Hollywood – and Moscow Again... I. Dzhendubaev …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Why the Film In August 1944th (Moment of Truth), Filmed in 1975, Was Not Released On the Screen B. Krishtul ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Diasporic Identities and their Representation through Cinema: An Analysis of Diasporic Film through South Asian Cinemas

Diasporic Identities and their Representation through Cinema: An Analysis of Diasporic Film through South Asian Cinemas

Dark Humour and the Female Performance of Subversion in South-Asian Diasporic Cinema: Chadha’s Rich Deceiver, It’s A Wonderful Afterlife, and What Do You Call An Indian Woman Who’s Funny?

This essay focuses on three films from Gurinder Chadha’s South-Asian diasporic oeuvre, Rich Deceiver (1995), It’s A Wonderful Afterlife (2010), and the documentary titled What Do You Call An Indian Woman Who’s Funny? (1994), in order to understand the brand of humour that is theorized and staged from the filmmaker’s diasporic context of hybridity and liminality. I will argue that the female characters in the first two films produce dark humour from a position of marginality – -gendered and class-based in the case of Ellie Freeman (Rich Deceiver), gendered and racialized (diasporic) in the case of Mrs. Sethi (It’s A Wonderful Afterlife) – which in turn allows these characters agency and control in a public space where humour is generally assumed to be the exclusive preserve of masculine authority. I will argue that the very figure of a woman performing/producing dark humour – especially in a racially-inflected diasporic context such as Chadha’s own – functions as a vehicle for the critique of normative social oppression, whether gender-, class-, or race-based, and therefore becomes an inherently empowering template and expository medium both for the female characters and for the genre of South Asian diasporic cinema.

REVIEW: Noted: Study of diasporic film making raises intriguing questions

Migrant and Diasporic Film and Filmmaking in New Zealand, edited by Arezou Zalipour. Singapore: Springer Nature, 2019. 209 pages. ISBN 9789811313783.
 IF PEOPLE think about diasporic cinema in New Zealand, they probably think about comedies like Sione’s Wedding or Curry Munchers or web series like Flat3. What they all have in common is an attempt to portray different aspects of a particular diasporic community’s life from the inside. Some films have been more successful than others; some exist only online or at film festivals.

Romanian Diasporic Cinema. Dislocation and Paraphrastic Forms of Expression in Recent Migration Films.

Romanian Diasporic Cinema. Dislocation and Paraphrastic Forms of Expression in Recent Migration Films.

June Givanni’s Pan-African Cinema Archive: A Diasporic Feminist Dwelling Space

What is the role of cultural archives in creating and sustaining connections between diasporic communities? Through an analysis of an audiovisual archive that has sought to bring together representations of and by African, Caribbean and Asian people, this article discusses the relationship between diasporic film, knowledge production and feminist solidarity. Focusing on a self-curated, UK-based archive, the June Givanni Pan-African Cinema Archive, we explore the potentiality of archives for carving out spaces of diasporic connectivity and resistance. This archive assembles the holdings of pan-African films and film-related materials, built over several decades by June Givanni, a Guyanese-born London-based film curator. Givanni’s archive embodies her long relationship with the intersecting worlds of African and Asian diasporic cinema, which hold deep connections to Black British heritage through global networks spanning across empire. In the making of this cultural analysis, we employ a co-produced, decolonial methodological approach by designing and producing the article in collaboration with Givanni over a two-year period. We aim to foreground the role of feminist labour (academic and practitioner) as agents of change who are reclaiming stories, voices and memory-making. The wider backdrop to this co-produced analysis is the ongoing resilience of a cultural amnesia that has pervaded the Black British experience and the current fragility of Black arts and cultural spaces in the UK. Our question is how might archives help us map the connections between racialised ideas of belonging, memory politics and the reconfiguration of colonial power whilst also operating as a site of feminist connectivity?

“Mapping Vietnamese Identities in Tran Anh Hung’s and Tony Bui’s Films: Femininity and Love”

Many Vietnamese diasporic film directors have presented women as conveyors of Vietnamese culture, with their love symbolizing Vietnamese identity. This identity has been characterized by the virtues of sacrifice, endurance, and cohesion within a patriarchal family. On one hand, their femininity, as well as their female beauty, can be fully realized only when they are viewed through the perspective of a man and connected to his love. This remains true even if female love sometimes becomes overly patient or rebellious. On the other hand, women in diasporic films possess characteristics that resemble the image of a woman in a traditional environment, or more specifically, a Confucian space. Love keeps them alive. However, they sometimes break out, their love causing them to rebel. Inevitably, they will return to the original, traditional space. This paper argues that this interaction between love, femininity and tradition creates a mechanism for the resistance of violence. In particular, it examines two Vietnamese diasporic directors’ perspective on violence in Vietnam, a place where maintaining a state of harmony and non-violence lays at the core of Vietnamese identity. The two films examined are The Scent of Green Papaya (dir. Tran Anh Hung, 1993) and Three Seasons (dir. Tony Bui, 1999).

Introduction to the diasporic autobiographical documentary

This article aims to introduce a new film genre that I call ‘diasporic autobiographical documentary’ that I have been working on during my last years of research, first in France and now in a broader context. In this genre, diasporic cinema and autobiographical documentary meet and create an original ensemble, especially produced in the last twenty years, in order to give place to the search for identity by individuals belonging to more than one nation and culture. In the first part, the present text exposes the principal axes of definition of this body of work, following Raphaëlle Moine’s theory of film genre. In the second part, it deals with two concepts necessary to understand the main issues of this genre: the diasporic subject and the origin. In the search of their lost origin and of their collective memories, diasporic subjects negotiate their identity through the subjective enunciation of the documentary, and offer an important work of reflection on today transnationalism and multiculturalism.

Refusal/film: diasporic-indigenous relationalities

ABSTRACTThis essay situates the cultural-political practices of non-Indigenous, racialized diasporas with Audra Simpson’s concept of refusal. I frame diasporic film that generates alternatives to settler colonial relationships and imaginaries in terms of ongoing practices of diasporic refusal. To elaborate on what this refusal can look like, I turn to South Asian Canadian filmmaker Ali Kazimi’s experimental documentary Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas (1997), a profile of Iroquois photographer Jeffrey Thomas that self-reflexively explores the politics of spectatorship and representation through an examination of Native subjects of Edward Curtis’ portrait series. Understanding Shooting Indians’ refusal requires not only an analysis of its representational politics, but the contextualization of the film as (a) a generative effect of South Asian diasporic artists in Toronto engaging questions of Indigenous sovereignty and relationality through art and community discussion, and (b) as itself opening possibilities for continued conversations and cultural production among South Asian diasporas and Indigenous peoples in Toronto.

Filmde Heteroglossia Filmin Heteroglossia’sı: La Haine

This article evaluates the film La Haine (1995) directed by Mathiew Kassovitz with specific reference to the Bakhtinian concept of “heteroglossia”. The film is still socially and politically significant and relevant especially in relation to the refugee crisis, the increasing xenophobia and islamophobia that continue burdening Europe today. The film can be considered under the rubrics of diasporic cinema, beur cinema, banlieue cinema and French cinema based on its thematic concerns and its central characters. This article, however, particularly focuses on the work itself as a heteroglot, polyglot utterance in the contexts of French film and banlieue film. Secondly, it analyses the framing of the characters as Others in the context of post-industrial, post-colonial France by focusing on their utterances and the social and cultural connotations of these utterances throughout the film. The close textual analysis reveals that there are several registers of heteroglossia detectable in this audio-visual narrative, underlying its multilayered character.

Book Review: Migrant and Diasporic Film and Filmmaking in New Zealand

Book Review: Migrant and Diasporic Film and Filmmaking in New Zealand

Between Hong Kong and San Francisco: A Transnational Approach to Early Chinese Diasporic Cinema

In recent years the terms “Chinese-language film” or “Sinophone” are often used to refer to a pan-Chinese cinematic culture to reconcile the differences and conflicts in the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. Unlike the other three areas that are easily recognized by geo-political borders, Chinese diasporic cinema is of a more conceptual and de-territorialized nature and has been inadequately examined. As early as the mid-1930s, Chinese filmmakers had formed a cross-border, Pacific Rim network for cinematic and cultural exchanges among Chinese diasporic communities. Focusing on Esther Eng 伍錦霞 (1914–1970), a San Francisco-born Chinese female director who produced Cantonese-language films in both the US and Hong Kong from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, this article revisits a piece of forgotten history of Chinese diasporic cinema. It argues that through Chinese diasporic films, particularly during the height of World War II patriotism, filmmakers like Esther Eng expressed their cultural belonging and fueled cultural intimacy between members of the Chinese diaspora. By observing the flows of talents, ideas, and resources within China and beyond, this article delves into the essence of diasporic film as a “contact zone” for Chinese descendants in and out of the country.

THE UNCANNY HOMES OF FATİH AKIN’S HEAD-ON

This article attempts to further the debate around the issues of Transnational Cinema by exploring Ahmet Gürata’s delineation of the phases of this genre. It traces the patterns of the model, especially those clustered around the symbol “home” in Gegen Die Wand (Head-On the 2004 film by Fatih Akın, Discussions resulting from the narrative and character analysis revolve around the way the film shifts the meanings of identity, home, and belonging, and focuses on the conceptualization and visualization of diasporic “homely” spaces. The discussion of belonging includes both the notion of belonging to a home/homeland and to something that might be described as an “uncanny” experience. The article also depends on Hamid Naficy’s (2001) description of Accented Cinema, and uses that model to make sense of exilic /diasporic films. Looking at diasporic places and exilic subjects that transcend the binaries of host-home or migrant-citizen, the article argues that Head-On calls for an alternative way of perceiving identity by narrating how different ways of being “at home” can be possible.

Migrations in Moroccan cinema (1958–2015): main thematic lines and evolution

ABSTRACTMorocco is a country with one of the highest migration rates in the world. With 29% of Moroccan films dealing with migration as the main topic, the objectives of this paper are to establish the most recurrent migration thematic lines and to determine how migration topics have evolved from 1958 – the year in which the first postcolonial film was produced- to 2015. A sample of 89 migration films included in the Moroccan Cinematographic Center’s catalogue has been explored by way of narrative and contextual analysis. The methodology has been complemented with in-depth interviews with eleven Moroccan directors. Our findings allow us to confirm that there is a close relationship between the production of migration films in Morocco and the socio-political evolution of the phenomenon. The most active production period occurred from 2008 to 2011. The largest number of films belongs to the category ‘migration/immigration cinema’ (18 films, 20, 2%). Secondly, the most talked about topic has been the ‘return home’ (16 films, 17,9%), and thirdly, that of ‘diasporic cinema’. Furthermore, Moroccan cinema has covered all the different phases of migration in a very balanced way, showing coherent cinematographic reaction mechanisms towards social reality.

Belonging, desire, and queer Iranian diasporic politics

Recent approaches to the study of queer migration politics and diaspora hold significant potential in advancing the study of the geographies of migration. Most notably, they can help illuminate the impossible positions that migrants often occupy; challenge diasporic norms governing cultural authenticity; destabilize conventional understandings of gender, nation, and home; and situate diasporic experiences within present and future possibilities for new ways of expressing intimacy and kinship beyond the limited scope of nationality and citizenship. In this paper, I will argue for a queer intervention on migration studies that critically expands geographic approaches to migration by denaturalizing and complicating approaches to understanding the emotional diasporic experiences of belonging and home. I will think through the usefulness of such approaches in my own ongoing research on debates concerning Iranian diasporic identities and communities in Iranian diasporic cinema. In analyzing two recent films, I argue for the tremendous creative potential of diasporic filmmaking in imagining complex spaces of home and belonging that otherwise seem impossible. Ultimately, I see queer approaches to migration politics and diaspora as having significant creative, critical, and positive potential to understanding how migrants placed in impossible situations create new lives for themselves.