Dr Manishita Dass (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Manishita Dass
This paper was presented on the panel 'Citizens of Plural Worlds: Family and Nation in the Age of Globalisation' at the SCMS Conference in New Orleans on 12 March 2011.
Juxtaposing privileged family fictions of 1950s and 1990s Bombay cinema, this paper aims to unsettle easy equations of globalization with progress and calls for a political history of changing representations of the family in Bombay cinema, a history that will connect representational shifts to shifting discourses of cultural citizenship and to changes in the Bombay film industry, and will defamiliarize contemporary fictions of the family, thereby loosening their hold on our imagination of Indianness. While recent films have recast the diasporic subject as the authentic Indian who carries “India in the heart” and is firmly anchored in “Indian tradition” through the affective ties of family, conservative social codes and elaborate Hindu rituals, the paradigmatic hero of the 1950s was an impoverished orphan or outsider adrift in a disorienting metropolis, relying more on the kindness of strangers than on the support of kinfolk or the comfort of tradition.
This paper was presented at a panel on 'Citizens of Plural Worlds: Family and Nation in the Age of Globalisation' at the SCMS Conference in New Orleans on 12 March 2011.
This paper examines the degree to which reality television can be said to represent the reproduction of democracy through its media platforming of ordinary, diverse citizens. It discusses Channel 4’s production The Grewals, broadcast in Britain in 2009. The ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary traces the trials and tribulations of the extended British-Indian family as they experience everyday life and family milestones including a wedding and birth. The reality series has been acclaimed as a, “seminal moment in the diversity history of Asian representation and in general of ethnic minority representation”. The series’ combination of particularity (the specific situation of a Jat-Sikh, British, Indian family) and universality (the main themes being centred on love, marriage, and family relationships) have also been praised by journalists and audiences.
Professor Barbara Mennel (University of Florida, Gainesville)
Barbara Mennel
This paper was presented at a panel on 'Citizens of Plural Worlds: Family and Nation in the Age of Globalisation' at the SCMS Conference in New Orleans on 12 March 2011.
This paper attempts to articulate a new methodological approach to the fragmentation of kinship structures through globalization and the cinematic response this evokes. Focusing on Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007), It Happened Just Before (Anja Salomonowitz, 2006) and Chicken Soup (Mario Rizzi, 2008), it maps out different figurations of familial loss in the context of female labor in recent popular and political filmic representations of migrating women. Political films that address female trafficking engage with the difficult question of children as motivator for migration into servitude and bondage. They portray the complex relationships between mothers and children in long distant care and the domestic and sexual labor through which women reproduce families in the first world. In examining visual articulations of sexual trafficking and female migration, this paper draws on feminist social science approaches, notably the concept of 'chains of care', alongside Leslie A. Adelson’s literary figure of 'long-distance affiliation'.
Professor Daniela Berghahn (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Daniela Berghahn
This paper was presented at a panel on 'Citizens of Plural Worlds: Family and Nation in the Age of Globalisation' at the SCMS Conference in New Orleans on 12 March 2011.
This paper is based on the premise that in cultural representations the family is constructed as the most important site of social and cultural reproduction as well as a trope of national belonging. Memories play an important role in the construction of familial and national identity. Families and nations are held together by their shared remembering as well as their complicit forgetting (Kuhn 2002). Drawing on Abraham and Torok’s (1994) concept of transgenerational memory, this paper examines how family secrets in Mississippi Masala (Mira Nair, 1991) and in Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, 2004), whether shrouded in silence or disclosed, put a threat to the stability of the family and force it to re-assess its boundaries. In the equation of family and nation, the diasporic family’s capacity to accept the Other, configured either as an illegitimate, racially mixed or as a queer daughter, would correspond with the nation’s capacity to integrate the Other.
