Migrant Characters Research Articles

Perceiving precarity and extremism in Nuruddin Farah's North of Dawn

Somali citizens, both at home and abroad, have been reduced to a life of uncertainty, instability and insecurity. This article considers Somalis as part of the ‘precariat’ (as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu, Guy Standing, and others). Drawing on critical terrorism and trauma scholarship, the article gauges the experiences of the precariat subject, highlighting how these experiences affect the daily lives of the Somali migrant community in Nuruddin Farah’s North of Dawn (2018). The aim of this article is to consider the relationship among precarity, extremism and the postcolonial émigré with regard to the contingent and fractious relations established by and between the Somali migrant characters and their hosts in the novel. Whereas predominant framings of precarity are characterized by labor insecurity, lack of any stable economic identity, and the fear of losing what one has, my argument in this article is that extremism is both a response to and attendant agent of precarity as presented in the novel. My contention is that Farah engages the precariat as extremist in the narrative present of the novel, highlighting the ways in which those that face social identification and marginalization are both at risk and risky to others.

Nella terra di mezzo: cinema e immigrazione in Italia 1990–2010 by Giancarla Vanoli

MLR, .,   homage to Franca Rame in her own staging of Mary at the Cross at the end of her play Passione. Dario Fo’s role at the origin of teatro di narrazione has been widely discussed, beginning with Simone Soriani’s  article ‘Dario Fo, il teatro di narrazione, la nuova performance epica: per una genealogia di un “quasi-genere”’, Forum Italicum ,  (), –, as well as in his  book Sulla scena del racconto (Genoa: Zona). Nor is the function of Fo’s relationship with the audience new, having been investigated by Scuderi himself in several articles and books. Rather, the original contribution of this collection is that it both looks back at the roots of Fo’s theatrical activity and looks forward by discussing his legacy as a consummate playwright and performer. Will the theatre of Dario Fo and Franca Rame—its political engagement and popular roots—maintain its relevance even aer their death? e essays contained in this volume indicate that it will. U  A D C Nella terra di mezzo: cinema e immigrazione in Italia –. By G V. (Linee) Milan: Meltemi. .  pp. €. ISBN ––– –. In her insightful study, Giancarla Vanoli sets out to investigate the fertile intersection between Italian cinema and the theme of immigration from  to , years in which the style and format of immigration films were first shaped. While this study follows the lines of previous Italian essays such as Sonia Cincinelli’s Senza frontiere (Rome: Kappa, ) and Angela Bianca Saponari’s Il corpo esiliato (Bari: Progedit, ), Vanoli’s work is original in demonstrating how Italian immigration cinema has worked as a ‘grande specchio dell’identità nazionale’ (p. ), while reviving the debate on authorship and genre in the Italian context. e volume includes a short Introduction, three chapters, closing remarks, and a useful appendix referencing major Italian films about immigration, about half of which are directly analysed by the author throughout the book. Chapter  provides a detailed analysis of the state of Italian cinema in the early s, investigating its turbulent evolution across the big and the small screen, in the rising years of Berlusconi’s Mediaset and at times of scarce public funding for the film industry. Vanoli highlights that, while television has played an important role in spreading xenophobic and populist attitudes towards immigrants, numerous film-makers have used the medium of cinema to convey solidarity with them. However, an appearance of support which in reality belittles the migrant characters is already identified in films such as Pirani’s L’appartamento (). In fact, the author clearly underlines how films about immigration, which was then—and remains today—one of the most divisive issues in Italian society, struggle to offer nuanced portraits of migrant subjects, and oen fall into the trap of buonismo. In the second chapter Vanoli examines the entanglements between immigration films and two strongholds of Italian cinema: author and genre. Analysing the works of De Seta, Bertolucci, and Olmi—the venerati maestri—she concludes that their  Reviews authoritative position in the Italian landscape does not exclude them from a paternalistic approach to narrating the story of the migrant, a clear example of which is identified by the author in the ending of De Seta’s Lettere dal Sahara (). Similar risks are highlighted in the production of the in-between generation of film-makers, particularly in the indulgent Western gaze cast in two major dramas, Amelio’s Lamerica () and Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (). Such risks seem to be avoided with the third generation of registi, such as Garrone and Manetti Bros., who are seen as postmodern, globalized authors able to offer a less hierarchical vision of the interaction between Italians and immigrants, as in the metanarrative of Terra di mezzo () or in the moves towards accented cinema in Torino Boys (). e third chapter concludes the analysis on genre in immigration cinema from the early s, arguing that the theme of migration brings new life both into the tradition of documentary—a notable example being Come un uomo sulla terra by Biadene, Segre, and Yimer ()—and in the resurgence of comedy with works such as Comencini’s Bianco e nero (). At the same time, the author...

Tracing Transnationalism and Hybrid Identities in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Making of Zombie Wars

Transnationalism is a current reality as globalisation has accelerated by the never before experienced boost in the development of technology, transport and telecommunications. The modern era is also characterised by migrations - voluntary and involuntary, but most of today’s transmigrants do not live the exilic lives once lived by migrants, longing for their homeland. Instead, they live in an in-between space – the host country and the homeland, where the mixing of cultures takes place. Although these zones have often been idolized in the recent literature, the lives of many transmigrants are characterised by feelings of loss, displacement and trauma. The present article attempts to map Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon as a transnational diasporic writer by tracing the features of transnationalism in his life and his novel The Making of Zombie Wars. It will also position that several of the migrant characters in the novel are hybrid identities, battling the consequences of displacement, trauma and mobility, following the ideas of Homi Bhabha and Jopi Nyman. It will explore the processes as they occur in spaces in-between.

Embodied explorations and migrants' agency: Movements, memory and solidarity in Passages by Émile Ollivier

Abstract This article argues that Emile Ollivier's 1991 novel, Passages, offers a representation of the migrant's body as a contact zone, as a space of entanglement of several processes of encounter and cultural productivity. The migrant's body will become the space where senses, cultural movements, memories, encounter each other, and the space of intersection of various forces. The body builds itself up at the intersection of the processes at stake, which each part of this article will focus on: movement, memory and solidarity between female migrants. In light of these processes, the migrant characters present in Ollivier's novel will be able to reclaim parts of their agency, previously lost in the wake of their displacements.

DISILLUSIONMENT AS CENTRAL IN THE LIVES OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA: THE CASE OF TWO ETHIOPIAN DIASPORA NOVELS

Though few thematic and narratological studies were done on Ethiopian Diaspora novels, detailed reading of the novels on disillusionment is unavailable. But disillusionment is probably a concept that well describes the diaspora situation. This study is a comparative thematic analysis of disillusionment in the African diaspora characters represented in ‘The Texture of Dreams’ and ‘The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears’. The results showed all the African migrant characters in the novels experienced disillusionment. Their disillusionment resulted from unemployment, underemployment, fear of unemployment, unachieved higher education goals, lack of appreciation, and powerlessness. Due to these, the immigrant characters fail to realize their dreams of a happy and satisfied lives and live in frustration and apathy. And the novel ‘The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears’ shows the causes and stages of disillusionment more elaborately. Except for one character whose disillusionment seems eased by joining the academia and starting romance, the rest nurse their wounds of disillusionment drinking alcohol and releasing their stifled griefs upon each other. No character reverses disillusionment. Thus, disillusionment seems central and inescapable in the lives of the alienated and culturally dislocated African diaspora. Doubly othered both as immigrants and blacks, they seem to have been left to wallow in frustration and apathy never finding a cure and nursing themselves with whatever provides temporary painkiller relief Keywords: Disillusionment; African/Ethiopian Diaspora; Novel; Alienation; Cultural dislocation; the American Drea

In Search of the “Goodlife”: Border Crossing and Agency in Luis Alberto Urrea's Into the Beautiful North and Graciela Limón's The River Flows North

ABSTRACTThis article explores representations of complex diasporic subjectivities that resist, or attempt to resist, obsolete nationalist notions of citizenship and identity by crossing the US– Mexico border (and, in so doing, crossing other intangible borders) in search of a better life. Two examples of border literature, Luis Alberto Urrea's Into the Beautiful North (2009) and Graciela Limón's The River Flows North (2009), have been selected for analysis. These texts, in describing various diaspora spaces—to enlist Avtar Brah's term (Cartographies of Diaspora. London: Routledge, 1996)—also examine how those who do not migrate are affected by migration. In Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016), Priscilla Solis Ybarra reveals how the past century and a half's Mexican-American literature contains valuable new approaches to creating and sustaining new forms of transnational relations between humans, and ecologically sound relationships between humans and nature. In many ways, the primary texts selected can be viewed as examples of “goodlife” writing because they highlight the socio-political as well as the environmental and economic crises in Latin America which force impoverished Mexicans to migrate north. As examples of border literature, these texts add a twist to “goodlife” writing by describing the border region as a hazardous diaspora space, and by emphasising the agency of the migrant characters who attempt to embrace their liminality and multiply located identities as they make the perilous journey across the border.

Italian Americans, Education, and Italian Language: 1880–1921

Italian migrants in the United States have been often associated to the tendency to neglect the importance of culture as an instrument of upward social mobility. Traditionally perceiving culture as a hegemonic tool of the elites, Italian migrants in the United States, who had a predominantly peasant background, were supposedly uninterested in educating their children, rather preferring that they drop out school to add with their work a supplemental income necessary to face the daily necessities of migrant families. Based on a long-standing prejudice, this supposed Italian-American disinterest towards culture and education has been revisited by some scholars, who have revaluated the migrant attitude towards the cultural realm. In the first part, this essay will offer an overview of the different scholarly views on the relationship between Italian-Americans, culture and education. In the second part, it will discuss how Italian-Americans approached the usage of the Italian language, the native idiom that was disappearing in the Little Italies with the progression of newer generations, which inevitably favoured the recourse to English. Finally, the essay will take into account how Italian governments in the Liberal Age (1861–1921) connected to the communities of the Italians in the United States through programs addressed to fostering the Italian language overseas as a way to preserve the Italianità, namely the Italian character of migrants.

‘“Do the right thing”: encounters with undocumented migrants in contemporary European Cinema’

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the encounters between European citizens and undocumented migrants in three European migration films – Eternity and a Day (Theo Angelopoulos, 1998, France/ Italy/ Greece/ Germany), Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009, France) and Terraferma (Emanuele Crialese, 2011, Italy/ France) – in order to explore a paternalistic tendency in European cinema’s representation of migration from the 1990s and onward. As these films shot by European filmmakers raise awareness about the predicament of child-migrants, the challenges of life in refugee camps, and quotidian forms of discrimination, they also utilize the Other-in-need as an avatar in order to construct a compassionate European identity, one firmly devoted to humanitarian ideals. In these Southern European films, migrant characters and their agency are taken down to he goal of survival facing extremely dangerous situations to make it to a utopian space in Northern Europe. While spectators observe the magnitude of the migrants’ plight, victimization disenfranchises their communities and reinforces their status as precarious subjects fated to permanently orbit the borders of Europe.

Literary-Legal Representations: Statelessness and the Demands of Justice in Héctor Tobar's <em>The Tattooed Soldier</em>

Scholars such as Arturo Arias, Ana Patricia Rodríguez, and Claudia Milian have brought to light the importance of the historical specificity and traumatic experience of the (largely undocumented) Guatemalan diaspora in the US in the wake of the Guatemalan civil war. These and other scholars have generally used a trauma studies framework to read Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998/2000) and Central American migrant characters in Latinx literature in general. This article focuses on the novel’s deployment of human rights language and categories, particularly refugee-ness and statelessness. I argue that the novel, through the representation of refugees, homeless people, and a child soldier, critiques the narrow definition of statelessness provided by governmental bodies and instead reveals the experience of statelessness shared by migrants and other marginalized citizens. In addition, I assert that the novel critiques commonly offered modes of justice in the wake of human rights violations, a topic undertheorized in human rights and literary studies, and encourages new models of justice for victims of state violence.

Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France by Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp

Reviewed by: Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France by Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp Greta Bliss Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp. Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. Pp. 226. This book fills a lacuna in previous scholarship on immigration and ethnicity in French cinema. Building on work in feminist and film studies, sociology, and ethnography, Kealhofer-Kemp shifts the historic focus by documenting cinematic depictions of the generation of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian women who migrated to France in the 1960s and 1970s, usually as the spouses of economic migrants or of harkis, and many of whom became parents to the more highly visible "beur" generation. Though first-generation women have often been consigned to a real or imagined status of invisibility due to the intersectional barriers they faced, their influence is perceptible at myriad levels in cinema and contemporary culture. Through careful examination of a broad corpus of over sixty films produced between 1978 and 2014, Kealhofer-Kemp traces the figure of the Maghrebi woman migrant across multiple genres, whether as documentary subject or as recurrent fictional character. Collectively, these depictions form a complex picture of first-generation Maghrebi women migrants' historical agency. The concept of voice, which Kealhofer-Kemp adroitly defines from the outset, structures her inquiry. In close, concise readings of a wide range of films, the author demonstrates how directors, actors, and storylines combine to reflect or challenge mainstream discourse on ethnic identity and cultural assimilation in France. This analysis dovetails with her discussion of recurrent intergenerational themes, such as tensions between first-generation mothers and their "beur" children. Yet even as Kealhofer-Kemp attends to the overarching sociological and historical conditions influencing both filmmakers and the public, her close readings reveal important nuances in how films have variously positioned Maghrebi woman migrant characters in relation to their households, families, and communities. The study's four chapters are organized by genre, each offering a different angle on the question of voice. Chapter one emphasizes the constructedness of documentaries, situating examples according to the degree of narrative autonomy directors accord to their subjects. In Chapter Two, on short films, Kealhofer-Kemp theorizes how some filmmakers deploy objects, rather than melodrama or dialogue, to symbolize women's agency in navigating complex linguistic, cultural, and physical boundaries. Chapter Three draws on spectatorship data and reception theory to highlight the influence of films within the previously less-studied genre of téléfilms (made-for-TV full-length movies), which can reach up to 8–10 million viewers. In Chapter Four, treating a selection of well-known feature films (such as Yamina Benguigui's Inch'Allah dimanche) alongside some less well-known ones, Kealhofer-Kemp considers how verbal and non-verbal forms of communication further enlarge and differentiate the concept of voice. Rounded out with the author's suggestions for future research and a generous appendix classifying the film corpus by archival location and level of access, this study offers a rich compendium of resources and analyses for scholars working on French film and cultural studies across an array of disciplines. [End Page 145] Greta Bliss University of North Carolina Wilmington Copyright © 2018 L'Esprit Créateur

Dirty pretty language: translation and the borders of English

This article analyses the politics of English, and translation into Englishness, in the film Dirty Pretty Things (Frears). With a celebrated multilingual cast, some of whom did not speak much English, the film nevertheless unfolds in English as it follows migrant characters living illegally and on the margins in London. We take up the filmic representation of migrants in the “compromised, impure and internally divided” border spaces of Britain (Gibson 694) as one of translation into the imagined nation (Anderson). Dirty Pretty Things might seem in its style to be a kind of multicultural “foreignized translation” which reflects a heteropoetics of difference (Venuti); instead, we argue that Dirty Pretty Things, through its performance of the labour of learning and speaking English, strong accents, and cultural allusions, is a kind of domesticated translation (Venuti) that homogenises cultural difference into a literary, mythological English and Englishness. Prompted by new moral panics over immigration and recent UK policies that heap further requirements on migrants to speak English in order to belong to “One Nation Britain” (Cameron), we argue that the film offers insights into how the politics of British national belonging continue to be defined by conformity to a type of deserving subject, one who labours to learn English and to translate herself into narrow, recognizably English cultural forms. By attending to the subtleties of language in the film, we trace the pressure on migrants to translate themselves into the linguistic and mythological moulds of their new host society.

Barcelona with the Eyes of the Other in Si nos dejan (Ana Torres, 2004)

The documentary Si nos dejan (2004) by Argentinian filmmaker Ana Torres is an exploration of the subject of immigration in Barcelona. By applying the theories of Jacques Rancière and Michel de Certeau, I analyse how Torres has created a forceful film originating from her need to express what she felt had been neglected ‘by acts of rule’. In this way, she is empowered to express her viewpoint and, in the words of Thomas Mathien ‘have the effect of shifting the way in which the social is perceived’. Thus, Torres’ documentary functions both as an arena of contestation and as a scene of dissensus thanks to the use of a dynamic political narrative discourse, strengthened by the director’s use of cinematic techniques. I will argue that Torres’ own position as an immigrant, together with the formal cinematic techniques she uses, enables her to create a documentary which functions as a political argumentation—a way of allowing her to give a voice to and thereby empowering the various migrant characters in the film.

The economic, social and ontological security of Polish post-accession migrants in popular media narratives

The article is based on extensive analysis of the general assumptions on the Polish post-accession migrants’ trajectories imprinted within the narratives of popular TV programmes. The depiction of migrants in the Polish media is analysed in reference to Alfred Schütz’s figures of the Stranger and the Homecomer as metaphors of the very situation of being a migrant. The empirical data come from two popular Polish productions: the docu-soap ‘Wyjechani’ (The Leavers) and the soap opera ‘Londyńczycy’ (The Londoners) in which we identified 59 migrant characters. The analysis of the narratives of their life trajectory leads one to the conclusion that migration from Poland is depicted as a source of an individual’s feeling of insecurity at the economic, social or ontological level. The article reveals the representations of migrants’ career mobility abroad, the relations to their co-ethnics and the indigenous population, and their sense of cultural identity. The final result of the study is a conceptual map with the general assumptions on migrants’ economic, social and ontological security imprinted in media narratives.

Homesickness, Failed Transnationality, the Conservatism of Belonging, and Salman Rushdie

The Satanic Verses as a text that dramatizes the failure of a transnational belongingness and the conservatism of place and belonging; it is a celebration of migrancy and cosmopolitan identity. Focusing on the tensions between the homeland and the migrant self, this paper intends to highlight a depiction of homesickness in the novel’s major migrant characters to show how they fail to negotiate an idea of a new cosmopolitan space that not only accommodates the migrant on equal terms with the city host, but also one that insists on the possibility of a community of different peoples living and working together harmoniously. The question of how the novel fares in the context of transnational globalism and the immigrant’s claim to citizenship rights and fair treatment is also considered.

A “Touch of Africa”: liberal bildung through an encounter with African immigrants in Andrew Brown's Refuge

ABSTRACTThis article engages with the emergence of a “reconstructed liberalism” (Blair 2012) in South African fiction published after 2000 through a reading of Andrew Brown's 2009 novel, Refuge. The novel, I argue, forms part of a body of fiction that views post-apartheid immigration from elsewhere on the African continent to South Africa through a predominantly liberal perspective. Reading Brown's novel through the framework of the liberal Bildungsroman, I show that it is, however, largely the white characters who undergo a positive development through the encounter with Nigerian immigrants and refugees, while no such solution is offered for the migrant characters. Evoking “liberalism's fetishization of victimhood” (Attwell 1993: 80), the novel partly constitutes African migrants as self-validating others. Yet, I also draw attention to the textual strategies employed that undercut any interpretation based on an uncritical adoption of a liberal stance in its engagement with migration. Brown's text productively juxtaposes the main character's embrace of the liberal ideal of a transparent world to one of the migrant characters’ insistence on the unknowability of other human beings.

The dislocation of ‘home’ in the writings of Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. In 1992, she moved to the USA and got Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Southern California where she is working for the moment as an associate professor of creative writing. One reason for choosing her literary endeavor as a unit of analysis is the urgent demand in diaspora studies to listen to the invisible underground voices from within marginalized exiles or minor writers who largely make up postcolonial literature. James Clifford asserts in this context: ‘if contemporary migrant population are not to appear as mute, passive straws in the political-economic winds, we need to listen to a wide range of “travel stories” (not “travel literature” in the bourgeois sense)’. Having some affinity with the Arab-American literature, Lalami's fiction blends the celebration of cultural richness of Morocco with an instantaneous critique of its sociopolitical reality. Within the valorization of local cultures, change is valued and identity stability is depreciated. It valorizes identities that are in process of becoming and in eternal quest for home. Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits is discussed as a fledgling development to the idea of impossible homecoming. While immigration (though illegal) opens new horizons for the migrant characters, those who are deprived crossing seem to practice a kind of re-rooting to heal their amputated identity. This is clearly expressed in Secret Son which exhibits how re-routing and dislocation enable the questioning of power whereas placement and re-rooting is conducive to fatal circumstances. In general, the novels of Lalami are engaged in a reconstructive project. They excavate what is excluded and silenced from the dominant history. In the act of unearthing micro-stories, the author tends to envision reality in a better way by filling up the gap of absences and by representing alternative histories to the dominant one that has no consideration to their positionality.

Globalization and Change in India: The Rise of an "Indian Dream" in Miss New India: An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee

In this interview, Bharati Mukherjee, the American author of Indo-Bengali origins, gives an overview of the ideas that triggered the writing of her latest novel, Miss New India (2011). She discusses the way that her novel sheds light on the changes brought by the process of globalization in India. The discussion focuses on the influence of Western ideals on the young Indian generation and the rise of a transnational worldview. The clash between tradition and modernity is the central issue in Mukherjee’s answers. She explains how the transformation of social and cultural structures initiated by the process of globalization in India caught her attention. The notion of change is set as the key term to understand both Miss New India and contemporary India. Along with this notion, she expands on some of the themes found in her earlier works, such as the process of “unhousement” and “rehousement,” the reinvention of identities, and the awakening of female migrant characters to self-empowerment. Mukherjee also emphasizes the changes occurring in the American literary canon due to the mass migration of writers in a globalized and transnational era through the introduction of a new literary category, “The Literature of New Arrival,” which adds a multi-ethnic aesthetic aspect to contemporary and transnational American literature.

Language and Bilingualism in Antigone Kefala’s Alexia (1995) and The Island (2002)

Migrants modify the spaces around them: not only by leaving one territory but also by occupying another one. In fact, their physical appearance, their behaviour, their clothing, their preferences and/or their language may be factors used both by locals to pinpoint them and by immigrants themselves as identity markers. Greek-Australian Antigone Kefala explores the significance and uses of language in her tale Alexia: A Tale for Advanced Children (1995) and in her novella The Island (2002). In these texts, Alexia and Melina –the main characters, respectively- use language as a central tool in their struggle to make sense of the world they live in. Being migrants and bilingual, Alexia and Melina have a relation with language that is not understood by many, mainly locals. Kefala uses language as a marker of difference, but, as shown by Jane Warren (1999), this difference can also be a sign of ethnic pride. Consequently, this article not only explores the relation between language and the main characters in Alexia and in The Island but it also introduces other strategies migrants may use to approach languages. The questions to be answered are the following: “What is the relation of migrant characters with their mother tongue? And with the new language, culture, territory and space?” and “Are there alternative strategies?” The expected conclusions are that language can be understood as the ‘enemy’ and ‘friend’ (Kefala 1995: 104) which can both empower and disempower migrants, but which relates them to the space and people around them. Given the fact that language is a live entity, the strategies may be numerous and may vary in time.

Informing Consent: Ethics and Immigrant Studies

In an increasingly global world, immigrants find themselves taking on a prominent role in the discourse and social change impacting both developing and industrialized nations. The character and profile of immigrants and migrants has diversified considerably over the last several decades, with refugees and immigrants seeking economic opportunity being joined by foreign nationals, medical tourists, and others who have chosen or have been forced to live outside of their nation of origin. Mobile populations rely extensively on communicative technology, and many depend on the growing presence of the Internet in the daily lives of people around the world. For immigrants as much as anyone else, and particularly those immigrating to and from industrialized nations, the Internet serves as equal parts tool, medium of expression, and a link back home.

Crossing the linguistic threshold: Language, hospitality and linguistic exchange in Philippe Lioret's Welcome and Rachid Bouchareb's London River

ABSTRACTInterest in the dynamics of border-crossing and migration has been a remarkable development among both film-makers and film scholars in recent years, and the cinemas of France and of the francophone world have been no exception to this. There is still much room for work, however, concerning the linguistic aspect of this dynamic. This article will discuss the use of multilingualism in two French films of 2009, Philippe Lioret's Welcome and Rachid Bouchareb's London River. In both these films a meeting between local and migrant characters is negotiated by use of a third language, native to neither and also displaced. Adopting the metaphor of hospitality developed by Mireille Rosello, which Lioret's film in particular makes explicit in its structure, and reflecting also on Jean-Luc Godard's famous description of language as ‘la maison où l'homme habite’, the article traces the concept of a ‘threshold language’, a space ‘on the doorstep’ in which a tentative cultural meeting can be initiated on equal terms and without commitment to the dangerous crossing into that place where the other is at home. It thus examines the negotiation of linguistic territories and suggests that these two films offer a challenge to conventional assumptions about linguistic assimilation and, through language, an alternative to the fraught assumptions of migrant relationships as those between host and guest.