Guest Lecture Daniela Berghahn (University College London Royal Holloway)
This presentation will explore the representation of interethnic romance in contemporary European cinema, focusing in particular on films set in the milieu of Europe’s rapidly growing migrant and diasporic communities. Interethnic romance typically functions as a litmus test about attitudes towards immigrants and ethnic minorities. Films such as Evet, I Do! and the American indie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a paradigmatic ethnic romantic comedy and wedding film, culminate in the spectacle of exotic weddings that mark the inclusion of the Other in the circle of the family and, by implication, the nation. Queer interethnic couples serve as a master trope of cultural hybridity since they are doubly coded as Other. For example in Nina’s Heavenly Delights, the Scottish Asian couple’s ‘coming out’ and union challenges fantasies of purity, which simultaneously underpin the ‘natural family’, based on bloodline and descent, heteronormativity and supposedly natural gender hierarchies, and nationalist ideologies, based on ethnic absolutism and other homogenising concepts. Reflecting the ever-increasing cultural diversity of European societies, many recent films feature love stories between different ethnic minorities, in which the romantic couple has to overcome familial prejudice and racial and religious divides. Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss….,the French comedies Café au lait and Bad Faith make a powerful plea for what Paul Gilroy has theorized as ‘postcolonial urban conviviality’. As the antipode to race thinking with its insistence on racial purity, postcolonial urban conviviality finds its expression in the spontaneous cohabitation and interaction of different races and ethnicities that have made ‘multiculture an ordinary feature of social life’ in urban centres and postcolonial cities in Europe and elsewhere (Gilroy 2004). However, rarely do these romances between Muslims, Catholics, Jews, blacks and beurs end in blissful matrimony; instead any promise of commitment and the prospect of a happy future together remains tenuous.
Daniela Berghahn is Professor of Film Studies and Director of Research in the Media Arts Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is also Director of the Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway. She has widely published on post-war German cinema, the relationship between film, history and cultural memory and transnational cinema. Her extensive work on migrant and diasporic cinema in Europe has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and is documented on the websites www.farflungfamilies.net and www.migrantcinema.net. Her publications include Head-On (BFI, 2015), Far-flung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2013), European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (co-edited with Claudia Sternberg, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Hollywood Behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester UP, 2005). Building on her work on diasporic and transnational European cinema, Daniela Berghahn is working on a project that explores exoticism in contemporary transnational cinema.
The event is free and open to the public.
This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies and sponsored by Forschungsschwerpunkt Heterogenität und Kohäsion and University of Graz.
Department of American Studies Graz
Institut für Amerikanistik
Attemsgasse 25/II
A-8010 Graz
Tel. +43/316/380-2465
amerikanistik(at)uni-graz.at