Guest Lecture Daniela Berghahn (University College London Royal Holloway)
In the age of globalisation, diasporic and other types of transnational family are increasingly represented in films such as Monsoon Wedding, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, East is East, Le Grand Voyage, Almanya – Welcome to Germany, Couscous and When We Leave. While there is a significant body of scholarship on the representation of the family in Hollywood cinema, the depiction of ethnic minority families in European cinema has so far received scant scholarly attention.
I see the preponderance of family narratives as related to the family’s dual function as a prime site of identity formation and as a trope of belonging. As cinema tends to depict social conflicts and historical transitions indirectly through affective relations in the family, the diasporic family on screen crystallises the emotionally ambivalent response to growing ethnic diversity in the West. Constructed as Other on account of their ethnicity, language and religion, diasporic families are frequently perceived as a threat to the social cohesion of Western societies. At the same time they embody a nostalgic longing for the traditional family, imagined in terms of extended kinship ties and superior family values. By affirming or challenging these prevalent media images, films about diasporic families make important contributions to wider socio-political debates about immigration, ethnic diversity, the success or failure of multiculturalism and even the rise of religious fundamentalism in Western societies.
My presentation will focus on the cinematic representation of Maghrebi French, Turkish German and Asian British families, adopting a transnational perspective. A close comparison of the road movie Le Grand Voyage by the French-Moroccan filmmaker Ismaël Ferroukhi, the Turkish German family melodrama When We Leave and the Asian British comedy West is West shows that displacement is identified as the most significant coordinate on which the diasporic family’s putative Otherness can be plotted and from which racial, linguistic, religious and all other differences follow. Since diasporic identities are above all spatially coded border-crossings and migratory journeys to and from the homeland proliferate in diasporic family films. But even when not dramatised, transnational mobility invariably provides the backstory. Thus, the tensions and conflicts that surface in these families stem from the fact that they are torn between ambivalent emotional attachments to their culture of origin and a different way of life in their country of residence.
In my discussion of family dynamics and conflict in diasporic family films, I draw on Arjun Appadurai’s influential concept of the ‘production of locality’. Cultural anthropologist Appadurai proposes that in modern globalised societies, localised forms of belonging have become mobile and negotiable. As a consequence, locality – understood as a ‘property of social life [and] a structure of feeling’ (Appadurai 1996: 182) – needs to be actively constructed and embodied through the material practices of everyday life. In films about diasporic family life, the production of locality is frequently imagined as a divisive cultural practice and as the cause of gender and generational conflict. Whereas the generation of the parents is usually eager to reconstruct local practices of their homeland, their sons and daughters challenge parental authority by engaging in alternative locality-producing activities through which they align themselves with the value system and life-style of Western majority culture.
What Le Grand Voyage, West is West and When We Leave have in common is that they feature journeys on which fathers embark in order to buttress their patriarchal authority or to acquaint their sons with the value and belief systems of their homeland, be it rural Anatolia, Pakistan or the spiritual home of Islam, Mecca. These journeys from the West to the East bring about family reconciliation or the rupture of family ties and probe the possibilities and limits of reproducing a locality, imagined as alien and remote, in the context of West European host societies.
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