Transnational Forms Research Articles

Generic histories of German cinema: genre and its deviations

Over the last few decades, the field of film studies has seen a rise in approaches oriented toward genre: studies that look at thematic, narrative, and stylistic similarities between films, contextualizing them within culture and society. Although there now exists a large body of genre-based scholarship on international film, German film studies has largely ignored the importance of genre. Even as the last several years have witnessed increasing scholarly interest in popular cinema from Germany, very few works have substantively engaged with genre theory. Generic Histories offers a fresh approach, tracing a series of key genres -- including horror, science fiction, the thriller, Heimat films, and war films -- over the course of German cinema history. It also addresses detective films, comedies, policiers, and romances that deliberately localize global genres within Germany - a form of transnationalism frequently neglected. This focus on genre and history encourages rethinking of the traditional opposition (and hierarchy) between art and popular cinema that has informed German film studies. In these ways, the volume foregrounds genre theory's potential for rethinking film history as well as cultural history more broadly. CONTRIBUTORS: Marco Abel, Nora M. Alter, Antje Ascheid, Hester Baer, Steve Choe, Paul Cooke, Jaimey Fisher, Gerd Gemunden, Sascha Gerhards, Lutz Koepnick, Eric Rentschler, Kris Vander Lugt. JAIMEY FISHER is Associate Professor of German and Cinema and Technocultural Studies, and Director of Cinema and Technocultural Studies, at the University of California, Davis.

Rogue diva flows: Aoi Sola's reception in the Chinese media and mobile celebrity

Theorizations of celebrity often contend with questions of the constructed nature of star persona. This is more so the case when discussing divas in Japan, as they are subject to a wide range of gender regimes that mould the ways in which their persona is produced and consumed. Contemporary forms of transnationalism in East Asia, however, have created media flows and fan bases that provide new opportunities for Japanese female celebrities to re-construct their star personas, transcending their celebrity status in Japan. Focusing on the case of Aoi Sola, a Japanese adult video actress turned celebrity, this article demonstrates how transnational East Asian flows problematize our static theorization of celebrity. Sola's interactions with her Chinese social media fan base have afforded her a cosmopolitan persona that has been celebrated as a cultural bridge between China and Japan. At the same time, her star persona leaves her vulnerable to re-inscriptions into transnational politics as played out in everyday media flows. This dynamic is best demonstrated in Sola's attempts to quell anti-Japanese sentiment in China as well as in her efforts to reinscribe her star persona using nostalgic associations of cultural similarity and a shared past. Based on analyses of Sola's celebrity trajectory from adult video to online Chinese mediascape Diva, this article suggests that contemporary star persona status is better understood in terms of gender, movement and ‘meshworks’.

‘Chilled-out entertainers’ – multi-layered sitcom performances in the British and American version of The Office

This article explores the comedic performances of the main actors in the Original British sitcom format The Office, as well as in the American adaptation, The Office – An American Workplace. It analyzes each performance in relation to a prevalent ‘acting versus performance’ dichotomy within the sitcom genre in general, as well as being results of their respective localized sitcom production cultures. Employing detailed performance and textual analysis and based on qualitative interviews with the creative personnel of both versions, this study argues that due to the requirements of the format's mockumentary discourse, the performances of Ricky Gervais and Steve Carell are in fact multi-layered and aimed at different kinds of audiences. Furthermore, it identifies them as central to each version's interpretation of the format's distinct embarrassment comedy and examines the nuances of the performance styles as a method to localize the main character for a domestic audience, therewith reconciling some of the fundamental challenges in the process of transnational format adaptation.

Emigration From Latvian - Discourse of Spouses Remaining at Home

Emigration is one of the major problems in Latvia since, in last 20 years, approximately 50 0000 people left Latvia. Migration as a social phenomen may be a protest against the state policy, and many people consider emigration as an opportunity to improve their material situation. Due to long-term separation, transnational family form becomes more and more popular in Latvia. The study is based on18semi-structured interviews with the spouses of people who emigrated, and the data was analysed using the method of narrative analysis.Separated by distance, parents do not have equal opportunities to participate in upbringing of children and household maintenance. Relationships with the relatives abroad become mediated, distance promotes weakening of emotional bonds. One fifth of the respondents stated that family life had fallen apart due to long separation, and the partner’s departure may be perceived as an escape to avoid responsibility for the family. In decision making about leaving the country, the expected economic benefits often out weight the psychological pressure, chance to improve the financial situation is often more important than being with the family.The separated families frequently find it difficult to adopt to the new situation, and the family members remaining in the home country must cope with all problems of daily life alone, besides that, one of the spouses may meet other partner, which creates a risk of divorce. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n1p673

Constructions of traditional womanhood in Botswana myths and popular culture

Mythic-historical narratives, oral legends, popular culture, and traditional marriage rituals offer African traditional forms of performance that shed light on the nature of sexual politics in Africa as well as practices of black female expression and popular resistance. These performance forms contribute to the circulation of negative constructions of black African women. This article sets up a genealogy of the image that begins with oral narratives and continues through portrayals of actual women. It examines misogynistic and stereotypical depictions of women in the Botswana collective cultural imaginary and in transnational forms of representation.

Beyond citizenship: emergent forms of political subjectivity amongst migrants

This article traces the formation of the International Migrants Alliance (IMA) through a study of its leading organisations and central campaigns. Founded in 2008 by 108 self-described ‘grass-roots’ migrant organisations, the IMA is a transnational coalition of groups from nearly every continent of the world. I suggest that through their work in IMA, migrants express a new form of political subjectivity, a form of ‘migrant labour transnationalism.’ Migrant labour transnationalism, unlike the homeland-oriented, citizenship-based, state-supportive forms of migrant political transnationalism generally identified in the scholarship, is based on counter-hegemonic nationalisms through which migrants contest their home states’ complicity with the project of neoliberal globalisation. Migrant labour transnationalism is, moreover, formed through contentious forms of political engagement and new transnational networks through which migrants are cultivating class-based collective identifications.

Nationalism in Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities since 1775 by Lloyd Kramer (review)

Reviewed by: Nationalism in Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities since 1775 by Lloyd Kramer Frank Schumacher Nationalism in Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities since 1775. By Lloyd Kramer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 272pp. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). The amount of scholarly literature on the concept of nationalism is daunting. Rarely does a single volume explore the history and culture of nationalism as concise, precise, and eloquent as Lloyd Kramer’s Nationalism in Europe and America. In this substantially revised, updated, and expanded version of his earlier work, Kramer, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, examines the influence of nationalism on modern history with a focus on the Atlantic world. He argues that the similarities in political themes and cultural underpinnings [End Page 887] of nationalism have outweighed the spatial and temporal differences in the evolution of this concept since the eighteenth century. The author makes his case in eight chapters: the first five explore common political and cultural themes that have shaped most modern nationalisms while the final three chapters provide case studies of early American nationalist thought, the high tide of aggressive nationalism during the first half of the twentieth century, and the evolution of nationalist thought since 1945, with particular emphasis on decolonization movements and the emergence of new transnational forms of political organization. The study’s historiographical and theoretical parameters are laid out in chapter 1. Kramer argues that the twists and turns of nationalism’s complicated history have obscured much of its continuities. He suggests that historically constructed national identities emerged in the late eighteenth century in very similar ways on both sides of the Atlantic through a combination of cultural and political ideas that connected individual welfare to collective identities. Such “imagined communities” gained their enduring cohesion through the cultural production of nationalist narratives in symbols, literature, art, and festive cultures. Chapter 2 explores the discursive origins of the ideology of nationalism from the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau to the American and French Revolutions and respective British and German responses to the new ideological construct. At the heart of nationalism was the notion that each nation should have its state and conversely that states should represent sovereign nations. In addition, liberal nationalism also connected questions of collective political legitimacy to ideas about individual human rights of members of a nation. Despite the concept’s inherent contradictions and its frequent violations, this linkage, according to Kramer, explains much of nationalism’s enduring global appeal into the twenty-first century. The third chapter examines the importance of philosophical, historical, and literary contributions to discourses of difference in writings on the nation up to the mid nineteenth century based on a wide reading of German (Herder, Fichte, Ranke), Italian (Mazzini), French (Gregoire, Michelet), Polish (Mickiewicz), British (Scott), and American (Emerson, Cooper) commentators. Kramer shows how ideas about distinctive cultural and linguistic traits and celebrations of national geographic spaces infused the cultural production of nationalism. Moments of heightened international tensions, such as the wars of Napoleonic conquest, substantially accelerated the spread of nationalist productions. [End Page 888] Chapter 4 connects nationalism and notions of difference to religion. Kramer suggests that nationalist ideologies did not displace religious beliefs but rather drew on religious themes and symbols to create a stronger emotional bond among members of a national group. Nations aimed at a fusion of religion and nationalism through the invocation of sacrifice in times of war and hardship, the narration of sacred texts (that is national constitutions), and the mystification of national heroes and shrines of national significance. In chapter 5 the author demonstrates how nationalist ideals overlapped with individual or group identities in nationalist discourses on gender, the family, and race. Kramer concisely explains how contrasting and connected identities of women, men, and nations reached prominence in the nineteenth century. Discussions of reproduction, sexual mores, gender roles, family organization, ethnicity, and race became a staple of nationalist commentary in Europe and America. Much of those discussions conveniently reinforced notions of exceptionalism that infused all nationalist ideologies and whose long shadow still lingers in much writing on the United States. The author takes issue...

Successful Earners and Failing Others: Transnational Orientation as Biographical Resource in the Context of Labor Migration

AbstractThe article discusses how post‐2004 Polish immigrants in Great Britain narrate success and failure in their lives. It identifies and analyses inter‐related narrations specific to the transnational form of migration. It considers migrants’ transnational orientation as a resource for narratively producing a successful biography. The article makes use of a biographical perspective and embeds the analysis in theories of biographical action, while adding new knowledge to the scholarship of migration. It argues that failure is relative to a normatively, locally fixed expectation of success.

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

European and Russian Cultural Interactions with Turkey

In the aftermath of the Great War the Ottoman and imperial Russian empires came to an end, and new geopolitical formations, what became the Soviet Union and Republican Turkey, emerged. In both countries a search ensued for new cultural identity and new cultural forms. At the same time, there lingered the possibility of creating new transnational formations and alliances. Clark’s article attempts to place the momentous shift from Ottoman to Republican Turkey and the almost simultaneous shift from Russia to the Soviet Union, and the subsequent attempts at cultural rapprochement between the two, within a broader context of cultural interactions with Europe as rival cosmopolitanisms competed for defining the “new Turkey” and also the “new Russia.”

On the Differential Attachments of Migrants from Central and Eastern Europe: A Typology of Labour Migration

In this article we develop an empirically grounded typology of labour migration patterns among migrants from Central and Eastern Europe, based on two dimensions: attachment to the destination country and attachment to the country of origin. We conducted a survey (N=654) among labour migrants in the Netherlands from Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. We found four migration patterns in our data: (i) circular migrants (mostly seasonal workers) with weak attachments to the country of destination, (ii) bi-nationals with strong attachments to both the home country and that of destination, (iii) footloose migrants with weak attachments to both the home and the destination country, and (iv) settlers with weak attachments to the home country. Our findings demonstrate the relevance to the debate on transnationalism and integration of distinguishing different migration patterns. Successful integration in Dutch society can go hand-in-hand with ‘strong’ as well as with ‘weak’ forms of transnationalism. The bi-national pattern shows a tendency to strong transnationalism, while the settlement pattern demonstrates less transnational involvement with the country of origin.

‘Saving the Congo’: transnational social fields and politics of home in the Congolese diaspora

This paper explores the diasporic ‘politics of home’ of Congolese migrants in Europe, in particular in the UK, and to a lesser extent in Belgium. We focus on the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the diasporic political sphere by examining the role of first generation activists, religious groups, as well as youth and women's organisations. Within the transnational political field, first generation leaders are in a dominant position and the involvement of other groups, such as women and young people is marginalised by their control of the diasporic ‘rules of the game’ in the Bourdieusan sense. However, the increasing involvement of Congolese women in the field of women's rights advocacy has opened up new paths of political action which can, in certain occasions, lead to transnational forms of engagement. Similarly, second generation Congolese activists are constructing a space of autonomous engagement, relying heavily on the Internet and especially on social media, some attempting to link up with wider social movements. The paper provides an understanding of the social and political construction of these different fields of diasporic engagement as well as their intersectional and dialogical relations.

Recuerdo y comunicación: sociohermenéutica de rituales de memoria

The analysis of memory rituals represents a methodological challenge for an interpretative social science. Ritual interactions are inscribed in a broader context, which is determined by symbolic traditions and the institutional agreements that configure the general framework of ceremonies. The study of rituals held on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th is an opportunity to highlight the linkages between these different levels in the analysis. Our data is based on a videographic research project that probes into the thesis of a “global” memory culture, according to which particular memories coexist and at the same time converge and interact with transnational forms of remembrance. For the analysis we follow methodological approaches rooted in the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of communicative genres.

A normative power Europe framework of transnational policy formation

Since introduced by Ian Manners in 2002, ‘normative power Europe’ (NPE), has emerged as one of the most widely debated approaches in European Studies. While critiques persist, NPE continues to be innovatively applied by scholars exploring the role of the European Union as a global actor. This contribution aims to position NPE scholarship away from ‘essentialist’ theoretical debates and towards its use as an analytical apparatus for examining transnational policy formation. Illustrating why NPE may be recast as a policy framework, it offers an exposition of its key concepts and theoretical underpinnings and presents a set of criteria against which it may be empirically assessed. Turning to how NPE operates as a policy framework, a survey and evaluation of NPE scholarship is provided as well as a comparison with other approaches and an overview of the strengths and limitations of the NPE framework for understanding the EU's policy process.

Information for Authors

Diaspora welcomes articles on all aspects of the topics with which it is concerned: diaspora and related forms of dispersion, transnationalism, nationalism, ethnicity, globalization, and postcoloniality. The journal welcomes studies of specific diaspora communities, whether past, existent, or emerging. We solicit essays on all aspects of the subnational, transnational, and globalizing phenomena that now challenge the nation-state and supplement the old international order, including but not limited to migrating peoples, cultures, nomadic ideas and works of art, and mass media productions that traverse frontiers.

‘Come Join the Rock Gharaana’

In the first two decades of liberalization MTV has been a symbol of the complicated trajectory of transnational media in Indian public culture. A juggernaut cultural force and arguably one of the most potent dynamics in the globalization of youth culture, MTV, whose content in India is largely film-music oriented, has recently ( 2009 ) introduced a rock-centric ‘making-the band’ show called Kurkure Desi Beats Rock On (KDBRO) that taps into and draws from a six-decades old culture of rock music performance in urban middle-class India. Drawing from personal interviews and examining musical and discursive texts from KDBRO’s first season, this article interprets how the show’s producers and judges have attempted to ascertain an appropriately ‘Indian’ yet ‘rock’ sound, with musical outcomes that display tension between a desire for audible cultural nationalism and the practicalities of performing a transnational musical form. Through close reading of the show’s musical and discursive negotiations I argue that the figure of the rock musician is a conduit for complicated cultural politics in which a mandate for cultural ‘authenticity’ is troubled by the realities of participation in a globalized media field—and that this dynamic speaks to larger social transformations in an economically globalized India.

Hybrid Legal Forms at the Gates: The Transition from Combined Legal Forms to Hybrid Corporations and its Consequences for Creditor Protection

This article illustrates that market participants not only choose legal forms but modify and especially combine legal forms which has strong implications as to the functioning of regulatory competition. By examining admissibility and proliferation of combinations of legal forms in the USA, England, Germany, Italy and Switzerland it will be shown that law makers react to customisations by amending their portfolio of legal forms with new hybrid legal forms. Hence, the evolutionary force of regulatory competition pierces the classic dichotomy of partnership and company law and opens new market segments. Finally, an analysis is made of how creditor protection can be assured in transnational combinations of legal forms.

Diasporic Identity, Transnational Agency, and the Neoliberal Reconfiguration of Global Migration

This book is the latest step in the long-standing dialogue between two academic fields: transnational studies and diaspora studies. These share a common initial intent: the will to place migrants’ experience at the core of migration studies, rather than on the integration of migrants into the new host society or the development of origin societies. However, the two endeavors also differ. Scholars of diaspora have focused on the processes through which migrants maintain a shared identity despite their dispersion and its consequences for integration and state politics. In contrast, transnationalists focus on micro-level practices and networks forged by migrants across state borders without necessarily presuming a shared sense of belonging. Recently, the two fields of study have followed converging paths. Works on diasporas have increasingly incorporated micro-level activities in their analysis while, conversely, research on transnationalism has paid growing attention to the importance of macro-level dynamics and actors such as states. In 1999, Robin Cohen and Steven Vertovec’s book and in particular their landmark “Introduction” heralded this convergence. Since then, diasporic groups are commonly perceived as a specific category of transnational formation. Admittedly, diasporas differ from other transnational communities, owing to an enduring group consciousness forged through cross-borders ties and practices. Although Diaspora and Transnationalism endorses this view, it also reveals new perspectives on the scholarship not only in the two related fields, but others as well. Indeed, since the early 2000s, the concepts of diaspora and (to a lesser extent) transnationalism have permeated the vocabulary of policy makers. The growing number of diasporic policies formulated by states and intended to attract the economic favor of their expatriate groups has led some academics to revisit common assumptions and theories about the making of transnational and diaspora groups. In consequence, new theoretical stances have emerged. Diaspora and Transnationalism reflects the current re-composition of the academic debate.

Pick It Up! Pick It Up!: The Transnational Localism of Ska

Ever since its birth in the late 1950s, ska has been a genre marked by physical and cultural diasporas and an openness to borrowing from outside its origins. The history of ska travels across national borders and integrates with other musical styles, making it one of the most hybrid, transnational forms of postwar popular music. The author follows that journey through the recent third-wave phase to close with Los Skarnales, a Chicano-based ska band in Houston who meld diverse forms, including the local flavors of their neighborhood. Throughout the study an ancillary topic lies in the background: the relationship between subjectivity and community.

Transnational entrepreneurship: Experiences of migrant-returnees to Serbia

There is a lack of studies on transnational entrepreneurship in Serbia, while transnational cross-border economic activities of Serbian migrants have so far been perceived mostly from the perspective of foreign remittances. The aim of this paper is to highlight the need to study transnational forms of economic activity in Serbia; identify transnational entrepreneurship among migrants-returnees in Serbia, as well as among those who maintain contacts and have business activities with Serbia; explore motives of respondents related to establishing businesses in Serbia, and simultaneously having business activities abroad. The first part of the paper provides an overview of relevant theoretical standings in the area of transnational entrepreneurship, emphasising the need to combine economic and sociological approaches. The second part analyses the results of a pilot study conducted through interviews on the characteristics of transnational entrepreneurship of migrants-returnees in Serbia. The study results show how respondents use the opportunities and overcome obstacles related to conditions for business activities in Serbia, as they represent an important resource in the development of the Serbian economy.