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.
Professor Daniela Berghahn, Royal Holloway, University of London
Daniela Berghahn
This paper was presented prior to a public film screening of Almanya – Welcome to Germany (dir. Yasemin Samdereli, 2011) at the Ciné Lumière in London on 18 January 2012. The presentation, screening and Q&A session with the filmmakers Yasemin and Nesrin Samdereli were part of a series of events which Daniela Berghahn organised in the context of the HARC Fellowship Welcoming Strangers she has been awarded during the academic year 2011-12.
Abstract:Almanya – Welcome to Germany reconfigures earlier cinematic accounts of Turkish German migration and diaspora. It is the first cinematic representation of a Turkish German family spanning three generations. Whereas earlier diasporic family films, including Solino or The April Children focus on the first and second generations, Almanya, as well as the Maghrebi French Couscous, portray a three-generational extended family, comfortably settled in the 'host country' and with no desire to return to their 'homeland' for good. In contrast to other films in which the Turkish migrants are ‘othered’ on account of their different cultural values, language and religion, in Almanya, the Germans are ‘the other’. The film’s innovative aesthetics is achieved by a clever juxtaposition of archival footage, which conveys a sense of documentary realism and, by implication, historical authenticity, and magical realist sequences whose visual exuberance is in keeping with the vivid imagination the little boy Cenk, from whose point of view the story is told. In his flights of fancy the mundane and the difficult aspects of the migrant experience are commingled with the improbable and fantastic.
Yasemin and Nesrin Samdereli with Daniela Berghahn
Almanya - Welcome to Germany premiered at the International Film Festival in Berlin in 2011 and has won numerous prestigious awards, including the German Film Prize for Best Screenplay and has attracted almost 1.5 million viewers in Germany alone. Despite its domestic and international success, to date Almanya - Welcome to Germany has not yet had a theatrical release in the UK. The screening which Daniela Berghahn organised at the Ciné Lumière in London was the film's UK premiere.
After the screening of Almanya - Welcome to Germany at the Ciné Lumière on 18 January 2012, Professor Daniela Berghahn interviewed the director-scriptwriter team, Yasemin and Nesrin Samdereli. The Q&A session was part of a series of events which Daniela Berghahn organised in the context of the HARC Fellowship Welcoming Strangers, she was awarded by Royal Holloway, University of London, during the academic year 2011-12. The audience also had the opportunity find out more about the making of this popular integration comedy.
In this keynote address given at the conference Welcoming Strangers, Robin Cohen assesses how hosts relate to strangers, proposing that we are often confronted by a simple irreconcilable dichotomy. The first proposition is that humans have always been driven by a primordial or culturally/historically acquired sense of difference, nowadays signified by a ‘clash of civilisations'. Alternatively, it is suggested that human cultures are forever melding and mixing in a churn of bland and timeless hybridization. By contrast, he tries to periodise and characterise the construction of difference in early modernity, when the variety and complexity of contacts, and their representation by (largely) European thinkers, create the main lines of demarcation. Cultural differences were also significantly eroded though cultural interactions of all sorts. Using the notion of creolization we can observe how this process occurs. In their contemporary interactions with peoples from different parts of the world, long-established communities deploy sometimes overt, sometimes more covert language and social practices derived from the splits described in the early modern period – between hard and soft primitivism, between Enlightenment universalism and the Herderian ‘many cultures’ tradition.
Professor Robin Cohen is Emeritus Professor and Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme Oxford Diasporas Programme, University of Oxford
Welcoming Strangers, an international interdisciplinary postgraduate conference, was held at Royal Holloway, University of London on 27 April 2012. Organised by Daniela Berghahn as part of a Fellowship awarded by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC) at Royal Holloway, together with an interdisciplinary team of postgraduate students, the event attracted PhD students from all over the UK, Spain, Germany, Australia and New Zealand.
Since the lifespan of the Welcoming Strangers conference website, where videos of conference presentations and other documents were hosted, was limited and the site was shut down at the end of 2012, at least the two keynote lectures have been preserved on the Far-flung Families website.
In this keynote lecture at the Welcoming Strangers conference, Stephanie Donald proposes that the child in cinema is a powerful fantasy figure, deployed to embody and aestheticise accelerated motion, sociopolitical displacement, and ontological transition, all of which conditions generate adult anxiety and fear. When the child leaves home, adult fear is both accentuated and brought to an exquisite peak of renewal and possibility. When the child migrates, that departure signals national and transnational impacts and affect. This lecture considers ways in which Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz is a template and a touchstone for narratives of child migrations and adult anxiety since 1939.
Professor Stephanie Hemelryk Donald (RMIT University, Melbourne and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Centre for World Cinema, University of Leeds)
Welcoming Strangers, an international interdisciplinary postgraduate conference, was held at Royal Holloway, University of London on 27 April 2012. Organised by Daniela Berghahn as part of a Fellowship awarded by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC) at Royal Holloway, together with an interdisciplinary team of postgraduate students, the event attracted PhD students from all over the UK, Spain, Germany, Australia and New Zealand.
Since the lifespan of the Welcoming Strangers conference website, where videos of conference presentations and other documents were hosted, was limited and the site was shut down at the end of 2012, at least the two keynote lectures have been preserved on the Far-flung Families website.
Professor Daniela Berghahn, Royal Holloway, University of London
The University of La Rochelle organised an interdisciplinary conference entitled La famille au cinéma (28 - 29 June 2013), where Daniela Berghahn gave a keynote address on 'Immigrant Families and Alternative Models of Family Life in European Cinema'. A video of her presentation and subsequent discussion can be accessed at the following site: http://portail-video.univ-lr.fr/Immigrant-Families-and-Alternative
In this keynote address, Daniela Berghahn proposes that films about immigrant families crystallize the emotionally ambivalent response to growing ethnic and family diversity in the West. Constructed as Other on account of their ethnicity, language, religion and different structures of kinship, immigrant 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 far-flung families make important contributions to wider socio-political and legal debates about immigration, citizenship, ethnic diversity and the success or failure of multiculturalism.Three films that engage with alternative family values and structures serve to illustrate this argument. The Turkish German family melodrama Die Fremde (Feo Aladag, 2010), which addresses the inflammatory issue of female honour killings; the British Asian comedy West is West (Andy De Emmony, 2011), which features a trans-local extended family based in rural Pakistan and Salford in northern England; and Abdellatif Kechiche’s portrait of a Maghrebi French patchwork family in La graine et le mulet (2007) that makes a case for elective family bonds over ties of blood.
