The Other in Contemporary Migrant Cinema

Imagining a New Europe?

Guido Rings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317360049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

As a rapidly aging continent, Europe increasingly depends on the successful integration of migrants. Unfortunately, contemporary political and media discourses observe and frequently also support the development of nationalist, eurosceptic and xenophobic reactions to immigration and growing multiethnicity. Confronting this trend, European cinema has developed and disseminated new transcultural and postcolonial alternatives that might help to improve integration and community cohesion in Europe, and this book investigates these alternatives in order to identify examples of good practices that can enhance European stability. While the cinematic spectrum is as wide and open as most notions of Europeanness, the films examined share a fundamental interest in the Other. In this qualitative film analysis approach, particular consideration is given to British, French, German, and Spanish productions, and a comparison of multiethnic conviviality in Chicano cinema.

1 Otherness in Contemporary European Cinema

1.1 Questions of Traditional Othering

Before analyzing selected examples of European cinema, this study will explore the different concepts of Self and Otherness that are quite explicitly reconstructed in most of the films in our corpus. As German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch reminds us, notions of culture

are not just descriptive concepts but operative concepts. Our understanding of culture is an active factor in our cultural life. […] If one tells us (as the old concept of culture did) that culture is to be a homogeneity event, then we practice the required co-ercions and exclusions. […] Whereas, if one tells us […] that culture ought to incorporate the foreign and do justice to transcultural components, then we will set about this task, and then corresponding feats of integration will belong to the real structure of our culture. The ‘reality’ of culture is […] always a consequence too of our conceptions of culture.

(Welsch 1999: 201)

Welsch summarizes here the basic distinction between monoculturality and his understanding of transculturality, concepts that could be located at the opposite ends of a cultural spectrum, with multiculturality and interculturality between these two poles. However, considering the wide spectrum of positions, which includes ‘multiculturalists’ like Stefan Neubert, Hans-Joachim Roth and Erol Yildiz (2013) and ‘interculturalists’ like Werner Delanoy (2006) taking on perspectives this study tends to categorize as ‘transcultural’, I suggest differentiating further by classifying the concepts in Welsch’s study as ‘traditional multiculturality’ and ‘traditional interculturality’, which will be examined below. All four concepts remain very popular, and they are significantly different, although Welsch and Graham Huggan (2006: 58) tend to stress the continuity among monoculturality, (traditional) multiculturality, and (traditional) interculturality, whereas Heinz Antor (2006: 30f.) and Delanoy (2006: 239) regard contemporary notions of interculturality and transculturality as complementary, an idea this study supports. In principle all four scholars reject the notion of monoculturality that shaped nationalism in 19th and early 20th century Europe and well beyond that period in most so-called developing countries, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey, as well as most African and Latin American states. By the end of the 18th century, philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder had defined monocultural mentality as follows:

Everything which is still the same as my nature, which can be assimilated therein, I envy, strive towards, make my own; beyond this, kind nature has armed me with insensibility, coldness and blindness; it can even become contempt and disgust.¹

The short passage describes a notion of culture that could be regarded as ‘closed’ (Benessaieh 2010: 13) or, more precisely, essentialist, homogeneous, and separatist in its link to the notion of a people. It appears both double-sided and hierarchical when sharply dividing a culturally and/or racially ‘pure’/superior Self from an ‘impure’ and inferior Other, and it can be enhanced by the cultivation of a ‘container culture’ memory (Moses/Rothberg 2014: 31). Although all this is not representative of Herder’s work,² he summarised the problematic side of this nationalist culture concept very well. Welsch rightly claims that such a traditional model is ‘not only wrong but dangerous’ in its assimilation and exclusion; in an increasingly global environment ‘it is important to imagine cultures outside of the opposition of own and other cultures’ (1997: 69, my translation), particularly beyond the well-known pattern of ‘the heterogeneous and the own’ (Adorno 1984: 192). With such remarks, both Welsch and Adorno imply that monoculturality is not a phenomenon of the past, although decolonization, mass immigration of non-European workforce, and the alternative culture concepts proposed by 1968 movements have contributed to a growing public acceptance of greater diversification in Europe.

By stressing the need for peaceful coexistence of different cultures within a society, traditional multiculturality re-establishes a relative distance to monocultural principles of purity and homogeneity, which is particularly important after long periods of extreme nationalist self-glorifications in the wider context of World War I and II mirrored in most British and US war movies from the 1940s to the 1960s could be cited as examples. However, the insistence on clearly definable cultural borders and on the perception of individual cultures as autonomous, self-sufficient, and coherent, reflected in so-called communitarian as well as left-wing progressive notions of multiculturality, remains a highly problematic aspect.³ The focus on cultural difference and coexistence rather than on interaction does not address the new challenges of intercultural communication in increasingly diverse European societies marked by the diaspora of an immigrant workforce from former colonies and beyond, such as South-Asians in Britain, North-Africans in France, and Turks in Germany. In this context, it might be worth stressing that tendencies to self-enclosure in an ‘imagined community’—to refer to Benedict Anderson’s famous discussion on nationalism (1991)—cannot be regarded as a one-dimensional pattern only applicable to people from so-called host countries. British and British-Asian directors have repeatedly highlighted this in their portrayal of Pakistani communities in Britain (see Udayan Prasad’s My Son the Fanatic 1997, Damian O’Donnell’s East is East 1999, and Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss 2004), and research on Indian and Pakistani nationalism confirms the socio-historical and political background of such tendencies.⁴ Similarly, Turkish-German directors have explored strong nationalist tendencies in immigrant communities (see Tevfik Baser’s 40 Square Meters of Germany 1985 and Hark Bohm’s Yasmin 1988), and there is no shortage of portrayals of self-enclosure in other migrant films (such as Philippe Faucon’s Samia 2000 and Tasma’s Fracture 2010). Consequently, one must assess the social impact of cross-cultural nationalism and racism on screen with regard to the link to nationalist mentalities in the host and the migrants’ home countries. In this framework, we should take note of the shift from biological to cultural racism (Hardt/Negri 2000: 189ff.), but it is also important to accept that the latter can be as essentialist and the former separatist.

The controversy about different concepts of culture increases when contemporary notions of interculturality are linked to Herder’s elaborations on the ‘culture of a folk’ (1967[1774]: 45). Welsch criticises the (traditional) interculturalists’ focus on cultural differences (1999: 196–197), which in my opinion is frequently mirrored in their leitmotif of ‘bridging differences’. The leitmotif continues to shape a wide range of work from William B. Gudykunst’s classic Bridging Differences (2004) and Patrick Schmidt’s less convincing In Search of Intercultural Understanding (2007) to Bernd Springer’s underresearched Das kommt mir Spanisch vor (2012). For Huggan, such a focus on dissimilarity implies a ‘back-door to cultural essentialism’ (2006: 58), whereas Antor stresses that contemporary forms of interculturality have abolished the idea of cultural oppositions and focus instead on a dialogue that intends to cross boundaries (2006: 29). Delanoy goes one step further when stressing that intercultural learning theorists have always shown a strong interest in ‘cultural interdependence’ and ‘transcultural phenomena’ (2006: 239). This theoretical discussion is of major relevance for the analysis of cultural representations in contemporary European migrant cinema because one often finds Huggan’s assessment of interculturality in films up to the 1990s (Stuart Allen’s comedy series Love Thy Neighbour from the 1970s, Ahmed A. Jamal’s Majdhar 1983, and Armendáriz’s Letters from Alou 1990). On the other hand, recent productions increasingly tend toward categorizing the way Antor or Delanoy suggest (e.g., Akın’s The Edge of Heaven 2007 and Kaurismäki’s Le Havre 2011).

1.2 Transcultural Identities in a Postcolonial Framework

Depending on the definition of interculturality, ‘transculturality’ can be defined in different ways: as a radical break with rather separatist notions of cultures (see Welsch 1999: 198), as the consequence of intercultural exchange (Delanoy 2006: 239), or as a significantly different concept that finally blurs the boundaries of individual cultures (Antor 2006: 30). This study supports Antor’s perspective and acknowledges that transcultural notions focus on the interconnectedness of our increasingly global environment and on interactions and exchanges that contribute to the development of a pool of global cultures potentially facilitating cultural choices.⁵ Instead of further enhancing separatist concepts of national cultures and ‘bridging’ the differences (Gudykunst 2004), Antor suggests starting explorations from the ‘interlocking interdependence of cultures in the age of globalization’ (Antor 2010: 12). This move would critically interrogate and destabilize the traditional binary construct of Self and Other and imply that questions of human agency versus collective structures have to be revisited and possibly revised. In this context, transculturality builds on well-established notions of hybrid societies, which have been discussed by Bhabha (1994) and García Canclini (1995), for example. However, it concentrates on questions of agency and remains process-orientated vis-à-vis a more results-oriented notion of hybridity. Contemporary urban landscapes such as New York and Tijuana, which García Canclini explores in Hybrid Cultures (1995), but also hybrid music and so-called fusion food could consequently be regarded results of transcultural dialogue and exchange. This correlates with enhanced cross-cultural agency in a period of increasing globalisation, including accelerated use of the Internet and virtual communication.

In his well-received documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005), Fatih Akın provides us with excellent examples of such agents within Turkish music culture, because the bands interviewed here draw very consciously on so called ‘traditional Turkish’ music,⁶ ‘Western pop’, and numerous other styles in order to create something new.⁷ This new style is the result of ongoing explorations and negotiations and as such is never complete. It cannot culminate in a harmonious entity because it is never free of tensions, but it blurs traditional boundaries when joining different cultural elements within a shared cultural framework. In this context, the musicians remind us that transcultural agency depends not only on the ability to redefine culture as a highly dynamic, interconnected, and transitory ‘relational web’ (Benessaieh 2010: 11), but also on the capacity to critically interrogate one’s own concepts of culture and identity. Films like Crossing the Bridge are able to support the development of such agency, because they help ‘to dissolve the solidity of one’s […] identity and to share the experience of “the other”’, which is a key aspect of transculturality for Epstein (2009: 340) and which is also a very important objective for the migrant film directors discussed in Chapter 3.

European migrant cinema can also facilitate the development and dissemination of ‘multidirectional’ memories (Rothberg 2009, 2011), which are key for implementing the ‘ethics of transcultural memory’ by acknowledging ‘our implication in each other’s suffering and loss’ and ‘our mutual experience of histories of destruction’ (Moses/Rothberg 2014: 29). Rothberg defines the three-dimensional focus of the transcultural turn in memory studies as follows:

The need for attention to theoretical definitions of actually existing transcultural and transnational connections; the ethical and political problems that attend the circulation of memories; and the possibilities for counter-narratives and new forms of solidarity that sometimes emerge when practices of remembrance are recognized as implicated in each other. (ibid. p. 31)

For cinema, this implies the need to critically interrogate, revise, and amend popular short-term memory of mass immigration to Europe as reflected and enhanced in contemporary mass media. The revision would include aspects of European emigration from conquest and colonization (in Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca 1991) to 20th century fascist imperialism (in Amelio’s Lamerica 1994 and Kaurismäki’s Le Havre), which prepared the ground for postcolonial migration (Armendáriz’s Letters from Alou 1990 and Saura’s Taxi 1996) and postcolonial diaspora (Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham 2002). Such a multidirectional perspective allows the viewer to explore parallels in the negotiation of identities as well as the monocultural, traditional multicultural, and traditional intercultural obstacles to it.

In this context, it would be fundamentally misleading to regard globalization, transcultural exchange, individual agency, and transultural memory development as intrinsically linked. In opposition to Welsch, this study argues that transcultural exchange and memory building can be traced back to ancient high cultures, i.e., it should not be regarded as ‘a consequence of the inner differentiation and complexity of modern cultures’ (Welsch 1999: 197). Also, one cannot assume that ‘the global networking of communications technology’ will necessarily further enhance transcultural dialogue and hybridization, because ‘there is no longer anything absolutely foreign’ (Welsch 1999: 198). The substantial use of global communications by the highly diverse spectrum of contemporary monocultural agents, from extreme European rig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Otherness in Contemporary European Cinema
• 2 Potential and Limits of a New European in Nicolas Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca
• 3 Migrants in Europe: Breaking the Boundaries?
• 4 Inspiration from Abroad? Cultural Boundaries in Chicano Cinema
• Conclusion
• Index