Flung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema 9780748677856
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far-flung families IN film The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema

Daniela Berghahn

© Daniela Berghahn, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12.5 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4290 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 7785 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 7787 0 (epub) The right of Daniela Berghahn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

iv vi

Introduction 1 1 Family Matters in Diaspora 18 2 Families in Motion 53 3 Family Memories, Family Secrets 85 4 Gender, Generation and the Production of Locality in the Diasporic Family 120 5 Romance and Weddings in Diaspora 152 Bibliography 186 Index 216

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Tea in the Harem (Courtesy of the BFI) 35 1.2 Pressure (Courtesy of the BFI) 39 1.3 America’s First Family (© Annie Leibovitz, courtesy of The Office of Public Engagement at The White House) 43 1.4 Hidden (© Wega Film, courtesy of Michael Haneke) 47 2.1 The Edge of Heaven (© corazón international Gmbh & Co KG) 55 2.2 Immigrant Memories (© Bandits. A film directed by Yamina Benguigui. DVD on sale at Editions MK2) 63 2.3 Journey of Hope (© Catpics, courtesy of the BFI) 68 2.4 Almanya – Welcome to Germany (© Roxy Film) 73 2.5 Le Grand Voyage (© Pyramide International, courtesy of Ismaël Ferroukhi)77 2.6 Le Grand Voyage (© Pyramide International, courtesy of Ismaël Ferroukhi)79 3.1 Immigrant Memories (© Bandits. A film directed by Yamina Benguigui. DVD on sale at Editions MK2) 92 3.2 I for India (Courtesy of Sandhya Suri) 96 3.3 I for India (Courtesy of Sandhya Suri) 98 3.4 Lola and Bilidikid (© zero fiction film) 107 3.5 My Beautiful Laundrette (© Film4) 111 3.6 Nina’s Heavenly Delights (© Verve Pictures) 114 4.1 Bend it Like Beckham (Courtesy of Gurinder Chadha) 127 4.2 When We Leave (© Independent Artists Filmproduktion) 130 4.3 When We Leave (© Independent Artists Filmproduktion) 133 4.4 East is East (Courtesy of Film4) 137 4.5 West is West (© West is West Distribution Ltd.) 138 4.6 Couscous (© Pathé Production, courtesy of Abdellatif Kechiche) 145 5.1 Evet, I Do! (© Cinemendo GmbH, DVD ASIN: B003EGI61M, Blu-Ray ASIN: B003EGI61W) 166 5.2 My Big Fat Greek Wedding (© HBO/BFI) 168 5.3 Monsoon Wedding (© Delhi Dot/BFI) 175 ­iv

list of illustrations

5.4 Bride and Prejudice (Courtesy of Gurinder Chadha) 5.5 Bride and Prejudice (Courtesy of Gurinder Chadha)

177 178

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway for their unwavering interest and support throughout this project, and to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences for granting me sabbatical leave during the early stages of writing this book. I am immensely grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for awarding me a Research Fellowship that enabled me to devote myself entirely to the diasporic family in cinema for a sustained period of time. Their generous funding has provided the necessary means to facilitate the exchange of ideas with other scholars, filmmakers and producers at an international conference on ‘The Diasporic Family in Cinema’, which I organised at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in 2011, and on a Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference panel in New Orleans. I am also indebted to the Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London, for awarding me a Fellowship and funds to convene a conference entitled ‘Welcoming Strangers’ and several research seminars. I should like to extend warm thanks to everyone who contributed to these conferences, roundtable discussions, public film screenings with Q & As and to a panel on ‘Hollywood Fathers and Bollywood Mothers’ at the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) conference in Istanbul in 2010: Feo Aladag˘, Stella Bruzzi, Robin Cohen, Manishita Dass, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Rachel Dwyer, John Ellis, Mark Hobart, Marc Isaacs, Gareth Jones, Barry Langford, Yosefa Loshitzky, Sarita Malik, Barbara Mennel, Yasemin and Nesrin Samdereli, Claudia Sternberg, Sandhya Suri, Carrie Tarr, Rosie Thomas and Leslee Udwin. By generously giving of their time and sharing their professional and scholarly expertise they have offered me a wealth of insights, fresh ideas and complementary vantage points. I can only hope that Far-Flung Families in Film does justice to their intellectual input. I am grateful to the students on my Transnational Cinema course at Royal Holloway for making the first run such a rewarding and enjoyable experience. They have taught me that the notion of a ‘diasporic optic’ is not just an aesthetic strategy and a useful heuristic tool but also something that happens ­vi

acknowledgements

‘live’ in the classroom while we are looking at diasporic family films through our own transnationally inflected lenses. I also owe a debt of gratitude to all of those colleagues whose suggestions and comments, via email or during long, inspirational conversations, have made a real difference to the progress of my research and have helped shape this book: Rob Burns, Paul Cooke, Richard Dyer, Thomas Elsaesser, Randall Halle, John Hill, Shirley Jordan, Mandy Merck, Hamid Naficy, Jonathan Powell, Karl Schoonover, Ayça Tunç and James Williams. At a time when knowledge exchange and impact have become oft-invoked but also contentious buzzwords, no research project can be successfully conceived without a dissemination strategy in mind. Therefore, my sincere thanks go to those organisations and individuals who have enabled me to go public or virtual. Maren Hobein at the Goethe Institute and Charlotte Saluard at the Ciné Lumière lent me their efficient assistance with organising the screenings of When We Leave and Almanya – Welcome to Germany, both hosted at London’s fantastic Ciné Lumière. Chris Jennings of PagetoScreen deserves full credit for developing and maintaining the website www.farflungfamilies.net, which combines beautiful design with functional interactivity and showcases all aspects of the project. I should also like to thank the companies, filmmakers and producers who were so kind as to grant me permission to reproduce the images for which they hold the copyright and whose names are mentioned in the list of illustrations. Although every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of images reproduced in this book, I have not always been successful. I apologise for any omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any additions that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. Parts of Chapters 3 and 5 have appeared in the journal Transnational Cinemas (2:2, 2011) and in the anthology Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens (2012). The feedback provided by the editors Deborah Shaw, Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel on earlier versions of material that now forms part of this book has been most useful and brought some of the arguments into focus. My heartfelt thanks also go to Manishita Dass, who read Chapter 5 and kindly shared her knowledge of Indian cinema and culture with me. My biggest debt of gratitude is to Stella Bruzzi, whose enduring and enthusiastic interest in the project even extended to her reading an earlier draft of the entire manuscript. I have profited enormously from her intellectual generosity, her insightful comments and constructive feedback. However, I alone take full responsibility for any errors and oversights. At Edinburgh University Press, I should like to thank Esmé Watson for originally commissioning this volume and, above all, Gillian Leslie and Michelle Houston for seeing this project through to its completion with such expert guidance and tremendous dedication. I could not have completed this book about families without the love and vii

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support of my own family. So finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my husband Chris and to my daughters Zoë and Hannah. Although they have kept me company in front of the big and the small screen over the past few years, I suspect that they will be relieved that, from now on, we can also watch films together that do not revolve around diasporic families.

This book is dedicated to my own far-flung family in Oxford Germany America New Zealand and in Heaven ­viii

INTRODUCTION

In the popular Turkish German comedy, Almanya – Willkommen in Deutschland (Almanya – Welcome to Germany, Yasemin Samdereli, 2011), Cenk, the seven-year-old grandson of the Turkish family shown on the cover of this book, is rejected by both the German and the Turkish football teams at his school because, as the son of a Turkish German father and a German mother, he does not qualify for either side. He picks a fight, comes home bruised and beaten, and then, when the entire extended Yilmaz family are gathered round the dinner table, comes out with the all-important question: ‘So what are we? Turks or Germans?’1 Nobody knows for sure. Cenk’s grandparents, who had left their Anatolian Heimat on the back of a sky-blue pick-up truck more than forty years before to go in search of a more prosperous life in Germany, have just acquired German citizenship and German passports but, paradoxically, also a home in their homeland. Cenk’s father Ali speaks hardly any Turkish and is, in most respects, far more German than his blond and blue-eyed German wife. And so Cenk has to make do with the seemingly unsatisfactory answer: ‘You can also be both’. Cenk’s innocent question raises the complex issue of belonging that, in some form or other, underpins all of the films about diasporic families in this book. As the heated debate that ensues amongst the Yilmaz family illustrates, memories of migration and an enduring attachment to the original homeland result in a diasporic consciousness, which feeds on nostalgic memories of the homeland and on ‘the dream of a glorious home-coming’ (Naficy 2001: 229). The vertical ‘axis of origin and return’ intersects with the lateral axis of dispersal, and both jointly constitute the diaspora experience (Clifford 1994: 322). Scattered across several countries or continents, diasporic communities are particularly reliant on modern transport and communication technologies to maintain social and familial networks transnationally, which has garnered them the accolade of being ‘the exemplary communities of the transnational moment’ (Tölölyan 1991: 5). Khachig Tölölyan’s much-cited remark in the inaugural issue of the journal Diaspora may help explain why diasporic family narratives proliferate in 1

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contemporary cinema. On account of their multi-locality, transnational mobility and local / global networking strategies, diasporas seem to epitomise what we commonly associate with the trendy catchphrase ‘the age of globalisation’ (although diasporas precede globalisation by some 2,500 years and the two concepts are not intrinsically related (see Cohen 2008: 154). Transnational mobility and migration are amongst the most powerful forces of social transformation in our contemporary world and are at the centre of public and political debates. Therefore, these agents of change evoke anxieties, with which mass migration and resettlement are charged, both for migrating and for receiving communities. Families, in particular, arouse a deep-rooted xenophobia, as testified by the headlines and news coverage they receive in the Western media. The influx of immigrant families who, on the whole, tend to have more children than majority culture families engenders fears of ‘being swamped’ or ‘outnumbered’. The inflammatory and hugely controversial bestseller Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany is Abolishing Itself, 2010), written by former executive board member of the German Federal Bank, Thilo Sarrazin, expresses and mobilises such xenophobic sentiments. He argues that Turkish and Arab Muslim families in particular, who ‘constantly produce little headscarf-wearing girls’, are breeding grounds of alterity and that their growing numbers will eventually lead to the erosion of Germany’s educational and cultural values and achievements.2 The media, not just in Germany but also in Britain and France, regularly give sensationalist accounts of the oppression and victimisation of daughters or wives. Forced marriage and honour killings are cited as shocking evidence of an unbridgeable culture clash between ‘immigrant’, ‘British Asian’, ‘Turkish German’ or simply ‘Muslim’ families and dominant culture. The social and cultural values by which diasporic families (though this scholarly term is not used in the media) abide are stigmatised as archaic and incompatible with the enlightened and egalitarian values of Western liberal democracies. The family, as the smallest unit of society and as the prime site of socialisation and identity formation, plays a pivotal role in the provocative evocation of such culture clash scenarios, given that, in public discourse and political rhetoric, society’s ills are regularly attributed to the decline or failure of the family. When, in the summer of 2011, rioters wreaked havoc in the streets of London and other major British cities, Prime Minister David Cameron (2011) put the blame on troubled families and admonished the nation to use some ‘tough love’ and ‘do better at bringing up our children’. While these admonitions were not specifically directed at families with a migratory background (since, as was noted almost with surprise, black and Asian Britons were not over-represented amongst the alienated disaffected youth who were rioting and looting), in most other instances of civil unrest, delinquency and crime, ethnic minority youths are almost automatically identified as the prime suspects – and not just in the UK.3 Some films about diasporic family life, notably those that follow the con­2

introduction

ventions of ‘the cinema of duty’ (Malik 1996, see Chapter 1), a type of social problem film that engages with issues of race and ethnicity, reinforce these anxieties about excessive alterity presumed to jeopardise the social fabric and cohesion of the host societies. Others – and, indeed, the majority of the films made over the past twenty-five years – offer more nuanced family portraits or even project nostalgic fantasies of traditional families, imagined in terms of extended kinship networks and strong affective bonds. As sociologist Anthony Giddens notes, ‘there is perhaps more nostalgia surrounding the lost haven of the family than for any other institution with its roots in the past’ (2002: 53). Some idealised portrayals of happy and nurturing diasporic families satisfy this nostalgic fantasy and, in this way, intervene in debates about ‘the myth of family decline’ (Kain 1990) in the Western world by suggesting that diasporic families buck the trend on account of their superior family values. Imagined as a ‘traditional’ family as yet untroubled by fragmenting individualism and divorce, the diasporic family encapsulates the longing for the golden age of the family that, as Stephanie Coontz convincingly argues in The Way We Never Were (2000), never actually existed. Whether filmic representations idealise or stigmatise diasporic families is, in large measure, determined by the ethnicity in question. In the essay ‘Double occupancy and small adjustments’, Thomas Elsaesser traces the ethnic fault lines between families ‘from countries that have family values which make all the members economically productive and upwardly mobile, such as the Chinese and the Indians, and those that keep their women indoors and illiterate, and raise their male children in the patriarchal code of macho-masculinity’ (2005: 122). We may want to add ‘Hollywood Italians’ to the positive end of the spectrum because, despite their machismo and excessive violence (in the gangster genre), they epitomise a people for whom la famiglia is the supreme value.4 In the ethnic romantic comedy Moonstruck (Norman Jewison, 1987), to which I return briefly in the final chapter, la famiglia represents the integrative force that helps overcome marital infidelity and fraternal rivalry because the collective counts for more than individual desires, though the two are happily reconciled in the film’s finale. The priority assigned to the collective (visually represented in large family gatherings and, in particular, the almost sacred ritual of family meals) makes idealised depictions of diasporic families an appealing counterfoil to the selfish pursuit of individual desire, which is often blamed for the alleged decline of the family in the West. In Francis Ford Coppola’s trilogy The Godfather (1972, 1974, 1990), however, family values become perverted and what makes the Corleones arguably the most famous and most fascinating Italian American immigrant family is the schism between good family values and the ‘amoral familism’ (Bondanella 2006: 261) of the Mafia, structured like a family along generational lines and demanding uncompromising loyalty of its members. Whatever brutal murders Vito Corleone and his son Michael, who reluctantly inherits his father’s mantle, commit, they do it in the name of the family – to protect their wives and children, to grant their 3

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sons a better life (Vito even aspires for Michael to become a Senator) and to honour the achievements of their fathers. Michael is such a compelling antihero precisely because of his ability ‘to kill without blinking because of his love for the family’ (Camon 2000: 65) – a perplexing moral ambiguity underscored in the parallel montage of his son’s baptism with the mass killing of his enemies at the beginning of The Godfather Part II. The rift between violence and love cannot, however, ultimately be reconciled. Vendetta and brutal murders within the Corleone family lead to its moral and actual disintegration. Although The Godfather Trilogy charts the demise of a family dynasty (and one that Peter Bondanella (242), amongst others, has compared to America’s First Family, the Kennedys), it nevertheless reflects a veneration of family values linked to another culture and another time: namely, Sicily’s rural past. As Thomas Elsaesser’s observations and the considerations above suggest, a strong family orientation alone does not suffice for the valorisation of the ethnicised family on film. The will to integrate, to be upwardly mobile and to become somehow similar to the normative model of the white hegemonic family, yet without replicating its shortcomings and failures, are essential prerequisites for the positive endorsement of the Other – and for the crossover appeal of diasporic family films. Consequently, families headed by single black mothers who are confined to a distinctly black urban culture – such as the aspiring music hall performer Anita in Babymother (Julien Henriques, 1998), or Ricky and Curtis’s mother in Bullet Boy (Saul Dibb, 2004), who tries to protect her sons from falling victim to black-on-black gun crime on East London’s ‘Murder Mile’ – do not qualify since they exhibit the problems that supposedly besiege the hegemonic white family in exponentially exaggerated form – and worse ones to boot.5 There also appears to be an implicit hierarchy of faiths that determines whether diasporic families in contemporary European and Hollywood cinema are valorised or vilified. Christians, whether Catholic, Protestant or Greek Orthodox, Jews, Hindus and Sikhs can all be assimilated into the secular and / or predominantly Christian host societies, whereas, in the wake of 9/11, in particular the Muslim patriarch and his sons have become almost irredeemable figures. All too readily associated with the lurking threat of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, young Muslim men are suspect as ‘sleepers’ (like, for example, Faysal, the titular heroine’s Pakistan-born husband, in Yasmin (Kenneth Glenaan, 2004), or Nazneen’s lover Karim in Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, 2007)), whereas the Muslim patriarch is frequently typecast as the oppressor of womenfolk. As the narrative trajectories of West is West (Andy De Emmony, 2010) and Mauvaise Foi (Bad Faith, Roschdy Zem, 2006), discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, demonstrate, secularisation is the only path to the Muslim man’s redemption and the precondition for his integration into the host society. These preliminary observations suggest that the construction of the diasporic family between the poles of strangeness and familiarity reflects the ambiva­4

introduction

lence that, according to Homi Bhabha, makes the Other ‘at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity’ (1994: 96). Stereotypes have the function of containing the powerful and unsettling threat of this ambivalent response by fixing it once and for all in a stable image and by repeating the stereotype, whose veracity can, of course, never be empirically proven, over and over again.6 The threat of Otherness can be controlled, Bhabha suggests, glossing Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), by ‘affixing the unfamiliar to something established, in a form that is repetitious’ (105). I would like to propose that diasporic family films, especially those that employ generic paradigms, succeed in muting the fear of the Other (often with laughter) in two ways. Family narratives are so ubiquitous in cinema because, in some form or other, all families are alike, or to be more precise, there is something universal about the family. Once we were all children, and many of us experience what being a mother or a father is like. That is why we can all relate to films about the family. In fact, many films about multi-ethnic and / or homosocial friendship groups (including Métisse (Café au lait, Mathieu Kassovitz, 1993), La Haine (Hate, Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) and Lola und Bilidikid (Lola and Bilidikid, Kutlug˘ Ataman, 1999)) construct the close relationships between the protagonists as family narratives. Films about such alternative family arrangements promote social diversity and inclusivity by framing what may be deemed marginal or socially contested as familial and, therefore, familiar. Similarly, ethnic comedies, which often make the polarity of similarity and difference their key structuring device, invite audiences to recognise that families, whether they come from Pakistan, North Africa or some other far-flung place not charted on our Eurocentric maps (such as the Yilmaz family’s ancestral Anatolian village in Almanya – Welcome to Germany, which cannot be marked with a flag because it literally falls off the European map in Cenk’s classroom), have a great deal in common. The experience of family life is one that unites humanity and that, therefore, has the capacity to build bridges across borders and different cultures. The growing trend to narrate stories about diasporic family life within established genres reinforces this sense of familiarity, since, like stereotypes, genres rely on cumulative iteration. In this way, the ‘genre film lures its audience into a seemingly familiar world’ (Baudry 1985: 416). The formulaic narrative process of film genres, their wellrehearsed iconography and predictable conflict resolutions offer a sense of reassurance that, according to Thomas Schatz (1981: 31), stabilises ideological conflicts in society through dramatic closure. By invoking the generic conventions of the road movie, the family melodrama and the romantic comedy, some diasporic filmmakers have succeeded in moving their films out of a narrow ethnic niche into the mainstream. Quite a few films about ethnic minority and diasporic experiences have achieved remarkable box office success and have promoted ‘the emergence of a new mainstream cinema in the USA and Europe’ by invigorating and rejuvenating 5

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the mainstream with ‘a multiplex accent’, Hamid Naficy proposes (2009: 3). In the essay ‘From accented cinema to multiplex cinema’, he uses ‘multiplex’ not to designate a particular site of film exhibition but rather to describe textual strategies that combine ‘multiplicities of various sorts’, such as ‘multilingual dialogues, multicultural characters, and multisited diegeses’, with media convergence and ‘a consolidation of the global media’ (3–5). Following on from his pioneering study An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001), which paved the way for much of the transnational, postcolonial, migrant and diasporic film theory that was to follow, Naficy argues that many of the aesthetic strategies and thematic concerns which he identified as being distinctive in a cinema originating from the experience of displacement and dispersal through exile, migration, asylum and other forms of transnational mobility, have become more widely appropriated by filmmakers who themselves are neither mobile nor minoritarian. Moreover, multi-platforming, participatory media culture, multi-channel media, digitisation and the Internet have made accented cinema, which Naficy defined as an alternative niche cinema created by artisanal and collective modes of production, more widely accessible than it was in the past. Although I am less interested in the new distribution channels and the (often short-lived) cultural diversity agendas in the film and television industry that have benefited this kind of cinema than in issues of representation, I acknowledge that the shift from the margins to the centre (or at least closer to the centre) is of paramount importance for the films discussed in this book. The attentive reader will have noticed by now that the book’s subtitle, The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema, is somewhat disingenuous. In order not to put off potential readers by a double dose of ‘diasporic’, a term that has gained wide currency in academic discourse but that has been shunned by the media industry (which prefers the term ‘World Cinema’) and by most filmmakers (who prefer the flattering term ‘cosmopolitan’), the subtitle does not spell out the fact that I am actually interested in a particular type of family in a particular type of cinema: namely, contemporary diasporic cinema in Europe.7 Its recent emergence as a much-debated critical concept is inextricably linked to the postcolonial and labour migrations of the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries that have ‘dramatically changed the social and cultural composition of European [and other Western] societies’ (Robins 2007: 152) and have led to the increased visibility of filmmakers with a migratory background and a growing interest in the representation of ethnic diversity and multi-culturalism on screen.8 By foregrounding the experiences of diasporic subjects and by telling stories about the dynamics of cross-cultural encounters and postmodern multi-culturalism, diasporic filmmakers living and working in Europe have complicated our understanding of European cinema and what it means to be ‘European’. European cinema is no longer just white, nor can it be adequately conceived of as an amalgamation of discrete national cinemas that coexist ­6

introduction

side by side, separated by geopolitical and linguistic borders.9 With its focus on Europe’s most established diasporic film cultures, Maghrebi French, Black British, Asian British and Turkish German, the kind of European cinema at the centre of this book is emphatically transnational, trans-European and hybrid. It gained critical mass more or less simultaneously in these countries in the mid-1980s and has flourished ever since. Unlike the relatively isolated earlier attempts of diasporic filmmakers to capture their personal experiences or those of their ethnic constituencies on film, those filmmakers who have come to the fore since the mid-1980s in Britain, France and Germany have made mainly feature films, rather than shorts, television dramas and documentaries, thereby enhancing the visibility and cross-over appeal of their films. As I illustrate in the first chapter, diasporic cinema in Europe and, especially, the rise to prominence of diasporic families on screen are linked to the social history of postwar immigration and European legislation on family reunification, which resulted in the transformation of temporary migrant into diasporic settler communities. The coming-of-age of the second generation that was born and / or raised in the host society has, in turn, led to the development of a vibrant diasporic film culture. Admittedly, the cinematic representation of diasporic subjects preceded the arrival of diasporic filmmakers on the scene, but these earlier films did not amount to a critical mass and, on the whole, took a totalising and homogenising approach to representing ethnic minorities. Only when the children of the postwar immigrants gained access to and control over their own images did they enter into the struggle over representing their identities by contesting negative and reductive images with positive or more complex and nuanced ones. Although diasporic cinema has attracted scholarly attention only relatively recently,10 partly in response to the boom in migration, diaspora and postcolonial studies, it is actually almost as old as cinema itself, yet previously different scholarly perspectives and terminologies have prevailed. For example, film historians usually do not conceptualise Jewish exile and émigré directors, actors and actresses, scriptwriters and producers, many of whom fled Germany when the National Socialists came to power in 1933, seeking refuge in Paris, London and eventually Hollywood, in relation to the Jewish diaspora.11 Instead, these exiled Jewish filmmakers are generally referred to as ‘European émigrés’, a term that obliterates their Jewish ethnicity – and for good reason. As Thomas Elsaesser puts it, ‘foreigners in Hollywood’ had the choice between either ‘disavowing their own homeland and heritage’ and ‘assimilate and become 110 per cent American or be European and exotic, but also 110 per cent!’ (1999: 99). The point I am trying to make here is that these terminologies are not arbitrary but reflect different agendas: while émigré filmmakers in Hollywood had to calibrate carefully the images they projected, either through strategies of camouflage and assimilation or through promoting their alterity like a brand in order to succeed, for contemporary diasporic filmmakers – as the subsequent 7

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chapters will amply illustrate – a self-conscious engagement with difference is almost invariably the preferred and expected strategy. In The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, Graham Huggan illustrates how cultural and ethnic Otherness has become part of a ‘booming “alterity industry” ’, making ‘marginality [. . .] a valuable intellectual commodity’ (2001: vii–viii). Not unlike the celebrity postcolonial writers and critics whom Huggan discusses, diasporic filmmakers such as Mira Nair, Gurinder Chadha, Fatih Akın, Yamina Benguigui or Abdellatif Kechiche play an important role as brokers of cultural difference, trading the minoritarian experience as a prized commodity. On the international festival circuit, these transnational auteurs are now vying with their established European counterparts for attention and awards. Their ‘double occupancy’ as hyphenated identity subjects (Elsaesser 2005), their ‘double consciousness’ (Gilroy 1993a)12 and ‘diasporic optic’ (Moorti 2003) can even give them a competitive advantage because they invigorate and renew the traditions of European cinema by drawing on multisited impulses and inspirations. Diasporic filmmakers have played a key role in making the boundaries between European and World Cinema more fluid, often juxtaposing and fusing stylistic templates, generic conventions, narrative and musical traditions, languages and performance styles from European and World Cinema, as well as from Hollywood, in their aesthetically hybrid and innovative films. Diasporic cinema challenges and frequently disavows borders of all kinds. Its protagonists transcend the borders of the nation-state on account of their dual heritage and typically try to assert their place in the social fabric of the hegemonic host society. As such, it is a cinema of identity politics, probing ‘difference along the multiple coordinates of race, colour, ethnicity, nationality, regionality, language, religion, generation, class, gender and sexuality’ (Berghahn and Sternberg 2010a: 41). It is a cinema in which spatio-temporal and spatio-racial modalities coalesce and converge and whose strategic agenda is the relocation of the margins to the centre, the valorisation and, ultimately, ‘the redemption of the marginal’ (Stam 2003: 35). As an artistic practice that ‘underscores the interstice, the spaces that are and fall between the cracks of the national and the transnational as well as other social formations’ (Moorti 2003: 359), it is centrally concerned with hybrid identities. Thus, in diasporic family films we encounter racially mixed couples whose union does or does not get the blessing of their parents, multi-ethnic families and family-like formations involving surrogate father figures or queer lovers whose inclusion or exclusion in the family is being negotiated and that call the heteronormative model of the nuclear family into question. Whereas most scholars conceive of diasporic cinema as linked to authorship, I regard this approach as problematic since it does not account for Avtar Brah’s concept of the ‘diaspora space’ (1996: 209, see also Chapter 1), which constitutes an important critical intervention in diaspora scholarship. ‘Diaspora space’ (which is different from ‘diaspora’) challenges essentialist notions of ­8

introduction

origin as a prerequisite for partaking in the diasporic experience. It is a conceptual space in which forms of cross-pollination between the artistic sensibilities of the ‘native’ and the diasporian take place and which allows for the inclusion of films authored by non-diasporic filmmakers, provided they foreground the experiences and perspectives of diasporic subjects. Nevertheless, in Far-flung Families in Film I privilege films made by diasporic filmmakers with the intention to participate in the important project of moving productions that have until fairly recently been relegated to the margins of European film studies to the centre. Moreover, the majority of diasporic family films have actually been written and / or directed by second-generation immigrant filmmakers. Much of the current scholarship in the burgeoning field of transnational, migrant and diasporic cinema seeks to map the still relatively new critical terrain; Far-flung Families in Film uses these important investigations as a springboard for providing the first sustained account of a particularly prominent theme – and one that has so far received scant scholarly attention. In the age of globalisation, diasporic and other types of transnational family are increasingly represented on film, yet they have been neglected in film studies. Except for Jigna Desai’s study Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (2004), which addresses the centrality of family narratives in Indian and Non-Resident Indian (NRI) culture,13 there is to date only one study that approaches the subject from a transnational perspective: Shooting the Family: Transnational Media and Intercultural Values (2005). Patricia Pisters and Wim Staat’s edited collection, however, covers a more diverse terrain. The essays are concerned with the impact of globalisation, migration and intercultural encounters on the family and explore, for instance, the interrelationship between audio-visual technologies and the construction and mediation of family life in home videos, on Dutch television and in a range of family-centred films. The contributors’ critical engagement with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s influential book Empire (2000) holds the anthology together and culminates in the overarching hypothesis that the upheaval of globalisation and the ensuing crisis of the nation-state have brought the ideological construct of the ‘natural family’ under scrutiny. In turn, this has led to a valorisation of immigrant families, whose interstitial position between nation-states, cultures and communities makes them the bearers of ‘intercultural values’ (Pisters and Staat 2005: 13). Far-flung Families in Film takes a more focused approach and aims to complement existing scholarship on the family in cinema. It is based on the premise that kinship is an issue of universal significance but that the structures, value and belief systems are culturally specific. Although this warrants a comparative perspective, a systematic analysis of families on screen from a transnational angle has so far not been attempted. There is a significant body of work on the representation of the (predominantly white American) family in Hollywood cinema (Chopra-Gant 2006, Harwood 1997, Leibman 1995, Pomerance 2008, Traube 1992, Williams 1996) and on Indian families in popular Hindi 9

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cinema (Dwyer 2000a, Gopal 2011, Uberoi 2006). The cultural construction of motherhood and mothers in Hollywood cinema (Fischer 1996), and especially in (maternal) melodrama and the woman’s film (Doane 1987, Gledhill 1987b, Kaplan 1992), has evidently held greater fascination for (feminist) film scholars than fathers. To date, Bringing Up Daddy (Bruzzi 2005) and Fathers and Sons in Cinema (Reiter 2008) remain the only systematic investigations of postwar Hollywood fathers, and this despite the fact that fatherhood narratives are a prominent theme in Hollywood, reflecting wider public debates about male parenting and changing family structures. Children, on the other hand, have triggered more interest over the past few years, as testified by three recently published books. Vicky Lebeau (2008) and Karen Lury (2010) are, however, less interested in the child in a family context than in its liminality and innocence in the encounter with war, death and sexual abuse. Alongside Cinema’s Missing Children (Wilson 2003), which deals with the trauma inflicted by the loss of a child upon family members, these studies take scholarly discourse in the field beyond Hollywood by also covering examples from European and World Cinema. A number of recently published essay collections, including Family Affairs: Ansichten der Familie im Film (Fröhlich and Visarius 2004), Portraits de famille (a special issue of CinémAction, Poirson-Dechonne 2009) and Affaires de famille: The Family in Contemporary French Culture and Theory (Barnet and Welch, 2007), bring family portraits in European cinema into view. Affaires de famille also takes immigrant families into account (Tarr 2007), as well as newly emerging family types in French cinema, which seem to testify to the decline of patriarchal authority and the growing significance of surrogate families (Powrie 2007). These, as well as Murray Pomerance’s edited collection A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home (2008), predominantly concerned with family portraits in contemporary Hollywood, attest to a growing fascination with the family at a time when it is deemed to be under threat. Family diversity is conceptualised primarily with reference to sexual orientation, whereas ethnic and racial diversity are all too often relegated to the margins. Perhaps Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven (2002) has attained canonical status as a modern-day Sirkian-style family melodrama (and as a widely discussed film in these anthologies), precisely because it probes how queer and interracial desire ruptures the fragile nuclear family and, thereby, problematises the hegemonic family along multiple axes of difference. In the main, however, one has to turn to studies on race and ethnicity, notably Linda Williams’s Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (2001), which comprises discussions of racialised and, one might argue, diasporic families (though this theoretical framework is not applied), but inevitably critical attention lies elsewhere. Finally, in my attempt to chart the scholarly fields with which Far-flung Families intersects, I also wish to acknowledge contributions from cultural studies: Representing the Family (Chambers 2001) and Mediating the Family: ­10

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Gender, Culture and Representation (Ticknell 2005) examine the discursive construction of the family in the media and in popular culture more generally, drawing on a range of conceptual frameworks and sources that have informed social, political and institutional debates surrounding the family in Western (predominantly Anglophone) societies since the postwar era. Deborah Chambers’s understanding of ‘the family as a site of cultural struggle’, where ‘the core values of civil society’ and its ‘deepest disputes and ruptures’ are acted out (2001: 165, 176), is illustrated with reference only to a small number of mainstream films, which she reads as barometers of changing family values and structures. Even though many film scholars might regard such an indexical reading of the family in cinema as somewhat reductive, there exists, nevertheless, an implicit consensus that the representation of the family in film reflects wider social and cultural trends, making the domestic sphere a symbolic stage or battleground on to which social conflicts are displaced. In Far-Flung Families on Film I propose that, as cinema tends to depict social struggles and historical transitions indirectly through affective relations in the family, the diasporic family crystallises the emotionally ambivalent response to growing ethnic diversity in Western societies. In this respect, the movies analysed here make important contributions to wider socio-political debates about immigration, ethnic diversity, the success or failure of multi-culturalism and even the rise of religious fundamentalism in Europe. Although I bring to bear anthropological and socio-historical research on diasporic families (especially in Chapter 1), I do not use diasporic family films as social documents that give evidence of social trends. Instead, I conceive of these films as important discursive interventions that either resonate with prevailing cultural and social assumptions about ‘immigrant’, ‘Muslim’, ‘black’, ‘Asian’, ‘Turkish’, ‘North African’ or by whatever other name these families are marked as Other, or that, conversely, offer compelling counter-narratives and images. The significance of cinema as ‘the most prominent medium of selfrepresentation and symbolic action that the hyphenated citizens of Europe’s nation states have made their own’ (Elsaesser 2005: 119) in the struggle over cultural representation is not to be underestimated. Historically, psychoanalytic and generic frameworks have dominated studies on the family in cinema, especially in Hollywood. Yet, more recently, there has been a greater diversity of approaches, perhaps fuelled by the growing scholarly attention given to families in European and World Cinema, which seems to call for greater historical and cultural acuity. In Far-flung Families I aim to develop a theoretical framework that is attuned to the specificities of the object of my investigation and that will facilitate further research in this area. I look at diasporic family films through the spatially inflected lens of diaspora criticism. Diaspora criticism is in dialogue with cultural and social anthropology, migration, memory, postcolonial and cultural studies, to mention but the most obvious related fields (see Chow 1993, 2010, Mishra 2006). It demonstrates the importance of place and displacement in relation to cultural 11

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identity, emphasising the fact that diasporic identities are, above all, spatially coded – hence the proliferation of border crossings, migratory journeys, the much-invoked opposition of roots versus routes (Clifford 1994, Gilroy 1993a) and the chronotope of the homeland. If displacement is, indeed, 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, then surely diaspora criticism promises to provide the most productive heuristic tool. Yet it is not the only one I engage when examining the thematic complex of diasporic families in film. With the exception of the first chapter, in which I define the conjoined concepts of ‘the family’ and ‘diaspora’ and sketch the social–historical context that brought diasporic families to Europe and on to the silver screen, all subsequent ones take a theme-centred approach. The second chapter, ‘Families in Motion’, traces families’ outbound and homebound journeys by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s influential concept of the chronotope that has been productively appropriated by Paul Gilroy and Hamid Naficy in relation to diaspora. My primary concern is how transnational mobility affects family structure. Does the family on the road (or on ships, trains or planes, for that matter) fall apart and disintegrate or does it forge new bonds within and beyond the family unit? Do the protagonists’ itineraries confirm or challenge the myth of a glorious homecoming, regarded by many as fundamental to the diaspora experience? My secondary line of enquiry probes the films’ generic and stylistic strategies and asks how Reise der Hoffnung (Journey of Hope, Xavier Koller, 1990), Almanya – Welcome to Germany and Le Grand Voyage (The Grand Tour, Ismaël Ferroukhi, 2004) inflect and modify the conventions of the road movie. And, finally, I examine how these films dislodge the Eurocentric notion of centre and periphery by projecting new and unfamiliar spatial geographies. The third chapter, ‘Family Memories, Family Secrets’, takes Annette Kuhn’s (2002) puzzling observation that families are held together as much by the memories they share as by the secrets they hide from each other as its starting point. Unlike the other chapters, this one attends to documentaries as well as feature films. I have included the postmemory documentaries Mein Vater, der Gastarbeiter (My Father, The Guest Worker, Yüksel Yavuz, 1994), Mémoires d’immigrés – L’héritage maghrébin (Immigrant Memories, 1997) and I For India (Sandhya Suri, 2005), amongst others, in which diasporic filmmakers excavate their parents’ memories of migration, because these intensely personal explorations illustrate the autobiographical impetus behind much of diasporic cinema in exemplary fashion. Drawing on Pierre Nora (1989), Marianne Hirsch (1997) and Alison Landsberg’s (2004) writings on memory, I interrogate how these documentaries triangulate the memory and postmemory within the family, the collective memory of diaspora and official accounts of immigration, written and preserved by the host societies. Family photos, home movies and other archival footage feature prominently and emphatically confirm John Akomfrah’s observation that for the ‘diasporic subject the archive acquires a ­12

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special poignancy [. . .] because it is the space of the memorial. There are very few tangible memorials that say, “You have been here”. And so, the archive is important because it is one of the spaces in which the memorial attests to your existence’ (2010). By going public with the audio-visual archives of family memories, diasporic filmmakers transgress the boundaries between the private and the public sphere and give private memories political resonance. I argue that both family memories and family secrets spin threads of continuity between the generations but do not always succeed in holding the family together. While memories are the family’s public face, secrets are its dark underbelly, the shameful events that have been ‘ruthlessly edited out’ (Kuhn 2002: 2). Invoking Abraham and Torok’s (1994) psychoanalytic model of the transgenerational transmission of undisclosed family secrets, I consider so-called ‘phantoms’ that haunt families, such as illegitimate birth and uncertain parentage, before investigating in detail the most prevalent secret and its revelation: the ‘coming out’ of queer sons and daughters in the diasporic family. I propose that in Lola and Bilidikid, My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) and Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, 2006), queer diasporic identities function as a master trope of hybridity. ‘Coming out’ in the diasporic family critiques fantasies of purity, which simultaneously underpin the ‘natural family’, based on bloodline, heteronormativity and supposedly natural gender hierarchies, and nationalist ideologies, based on ethnic absolutism and other homogenising concepts. Chapter 4 examines the dynamics of gender and generation in the diasporic family, broaching contested issues such as female dress codes (notably the headscarf) and honour killings in relation to the controversial figure of the (Muslim) patriarch. Rather than looking at these inflammatory themes through the critical lens of ethnic stereotyping, I approach them in relation to frameworks that emphasise the importance of place and the body, notably Arjun Appadurai’s ‘production of locality’ (1996), Ulf Hannerz’s ‘habitats of meaning’ (1996), Avtar Brah’s ‘homing desire’ (1996) and Laura Marks’s discussion of embodiment in intercultural cinema of the senses (2000). What these different theories suggest is 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, italics in the original) – needs to be actively constructed and embodied through the material practices of everyday life. I argue that in diasporic family films, the production of locality is often imagined as a divisive cultural practice and as the cause of gender and generational conflict. Through adhering to the sartorial and culinary traditions, the language and rituals from the homeland, parents frequently profess their allegiances to a place and community far away. Their Westernised offspring, by contrast, typically engage in the production of culturally hybrid localities in the streets and playgrounds of urban youth culture and on their bodies. Close readings of Die Fremde (When We Leave, Feo Aladag˘, 2010), East is East (Damien O’Donnell, 1999), its 13

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sequel West is West and La Graine et le mulet (Couscous / The Secret of the Grain, Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007) attend to the consumption of media and food and the performance of gendered and generational topographies. I try to establish how the protagonists’ cultural attachments that are articulated in this way map on to the kinds of family structure that these films engender and endorse. The final chapter, ‘Romance and Weddings in Diaspora’, asks why weddings proliferate in diasporic family films and what it is about the big fat diasporic wedding that captures the imagination of multiple and diverse audiences? After providing a succinct survey of the wedding theme in its many variations, ranging from films about arranged marriage, sham weddings and interethnic romance, I explore diasporic wedding films in terms of their generic characteristics. Wedding films emerged during the 1990s as an identifiable strand of the romantic comedy in mainstream cinema in the West and, as a variation of the romantic family drama, in Bollywood.14 Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994) and Hum Aapke Hain Koun (Can You Name Our Relationship?, Sooraj Barjatya, 1994) are widely cited as the foundational texts, while My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Joel Zwick, 2002) established the generic paradigm of the diasporic wedding film. The overriding concern of this chapter is how Evet, ich will! (Evet, I Do!, Sinan Akkus, 2008), Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair, 2001) and Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha, 2005) modify and invigorate the romcom / wedding film genre through a diasporic optic and the ‘truly cross-cultural encounters’ which Janet Staiger (2003: 196) has identified as a prerequisite of generic hybridity. I propose that diasporic wedding films fuse the conventions of romantic comedy with family melodrama, adding the allure of exotic wedding rituals, a heavy dose of heart-warming family feeling and some Bollywood-style song and dance numbers, thrown in for good measure. Let me, then, conclude with the usual obligatory disclaimers. Although in each chapter I offer not only detailed discussions of three or four case studies but also a survey of additional, thematically relevant films, I do not purport to give an exhaustive account of Maghrebi French, Black and British Asian and Turkish German feature films about diasporic families released between 1985 and 2011, as I do not wish to sacrifice analytical depth for breadth. Crossing the borders of the national in more than just one way, I purposely avoid a question to which some readers may expect an answer: namely, how diasporic families in British cinema differ from those in German or French cinema. It seems to me that this line of enquiry would represent an undesirable relapse into the critical paradigm of national cinema. Most of the films I have chosen as case studies are available on DVD with English subtitles, which should make this book equally accessible to the polyglot and the monolingual reader. Furthermore, many of the films analysed in detail are in English in the first place, since for a Continental European like myself, British cinema is part and parcel of European cinema. Finally, I should like to draw the reader’s attention to the companion website ­14

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of Far-flung Families on Film, which documents the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project underpinning the genesis of this book. There you will find a wealth of additional material on the subject, including a searchable database of films, a blog and an archive of podcasts featuring conference presentations, roundtable discussions and interviews with filmmakers. The website offers much scope for interactivity and I hope that this book will inspire you to share your thoughts and ideas on www.farflungfamilies.net. Notes 1. The English translation of this quotation and of all subsequent ones is taken, unless indicated otherwise, from the English subtitled version of the film. 2. The original German quotation from the interview with Sarrazin reads ‘ständig neue kleine Kopftuchmädchen produziert’, cited in dpa / Reuters 2009. Sarrazin’s incendiary book sold over 1.5 million copies, making it the highest-selling political book in a decade. For an excellent survey on xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiments in Germany, see Göktürk, Gramling and Kaes (2007: 107–48). 3. The issue as to whether the London riots were related to race and racism in British society was widely debated in the British media. Peter Hitchens (2011) from the Daily Mail made the point that ‘this is an equal-opportunity crime wave. The lawbreakers are not from any distinct ethnic group, and attempts to explain this behaviour on these grounds are baseless and poisonous’. Unlike in the French riots of autumn 2005 (‘les émeutes des banlieues de 2005’), which involved a high proportion of youth of African or Maghrebi heritage, no such racial bias was evident in the London riots. Nevertheless, some journalists tried hard to construct a connection. Christina Odone, a columnist from the Daily Telegraph, blamed absent fathers and her blog, not coincidentally, featured the image of a black adolescent youth with the caption ‘Children are lost without fathers’ (2011). On the BBC’s Newsnight, historian David Starkey provocatively equated black culture with gang culture and attributed the London riots to the influence of black ‘destructive, nihilistic gangster culture’ on white British youth who ‘have become black’ (Starkey 2011). 4. For further insightful discussions of Italian American immigrants in Hollywood, see Marx and Cohen (2010) and Bruzzi (2011). 5. Although I do not wish to be complicit in relegating alternative family structures to the margin, I have not selected these films for detailed case studies since their primary focus does not lie on the family. Babymother, though touching upon black single mothers and teenage pregnancy, is first and foremost about black music and dancehall culture (see Chapter 4 and Dudrah 2012b), while Bullet Boy centres on black gang culture. Representations of single black mothers struggling to protect their sons from drugs and gang crime are particularly prominent in American cinema. Perhaps the best-known example is John Singleton’s critically acclaimed film Boyz ’n the Hood (1991). The protagonist’s mother, Reva, hands over her son Tre to her former husband Furious in the full knowledge that she ‘can’t teach him to be a man’. Although Reva’s decision, which allows her to pursue her career unhampered by maternal duties, may seem selfish at first, she is vindicated by the film’s narrative trajectory. Furious, the idealised black father, is a perfect male role model and safely guides Tre to manhood, whereas Tre’s friends Ricky and Doughboy from across the road, half-brothers who are brought up by their single black mother, become embroiled in crime and gang culture and are both murdered in a feud. See Bruzzi (2005) and Massood (2003) for insightful discussions of this film.

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6. On (ethnic) stereotyping in cinema, I have found Dyer (1993), Friedman (1991), Rosello (1998), Shohat and Stam (1994), and Wiegman (1998) particularly inspiring. 7. For an exploration of the partially overlapping concepts ‘transnational, ‘diasporic’, ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘World Cinema’, see Berghahn and Sternberg (2010b), Durovicová and Newman (2010), Elsaesser (2005), and Nagib, Perriam and Dudrah (2012). For an industrial perspective on these categories, listen to interviews with John Akomfrah, Parminder Vir, Ralph Schwingel from Wüste Film Productions and Eve Gabereau from the distribution company Soda Pictures, available as podcasts on the website of my previous collaborative research project, Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe: http://www.migrantcin​ ema.net/podcasts/ 8. Following the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, migration from Eastern Europe to the politically more stable and prosperous old Europe has transformed Europe’s geopolitical topography and has had a significant impact on European cinema. These changes do not, however, relate to the diasporic film cultures with which I am concerned here. They have been examined by Rosalind Galt (2006), who redraws the map of East and West European cinema at the historical juncture of the 1990s, and by Dina Iordanova (2003), who focuses on East Central European cinema. 9. Galt dates the emergence of a trans- or supranational European cinema to the 1990s. After the end of the Cold War and the expansion of the European Union, ‘the idea of Europe [became] once again culturally and political central’, as testified in a ‘cinematic discourse on Europeanness’ (2006: 105). Moreover, European coproductions had become common practice by then, making the search for a film’s national specificity increasingly problematic. 10. A chronology of titles reflects the rapidly growing interest that diasporic cinema has enjoyed since the mid-1990s: Cinemas of the Black Diaspora (Martin 1995); Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora (Foster 1997); An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Naficy 2001); Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diasporas (Cunningham and Sinclair 2001); Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities (Rueschmann 2003b); Bidding for the Mainstream: Black and Asian British Film since the 1990s (Korte and Sternberg 2004); Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France (Tarr 2005); Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (Desai 2004); From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989–1997 (Marchetti 2006); Contact Zones: Memory, Origin, and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema (Petty 2008); Diasporas of Australian Cinema (Simpson, Murawska and Lambert 2009); Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema (Loshitzky 2010); European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe (Berghahn and Sternberg 2010b); Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora (Mehta and Panhariphande 2010); Bollywood Travels: Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Popular Hindi Cinema (Dudrah 2012a); The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens: Race, Sex, and Cinema (Marchetti 2012) and Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium (Hake and Mennel 2012). There are numerous other studies, including The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Marks 2000); Black in the British Frame: The Black Experience in British Film and Television (Bourne 2001) and French Minority Cinema (Johnston 2010) that also consider diasporic cinema but privilege other conceptual frameworks. The more encompassing concept of transnational cinema has received even more critical attention, so that I shall refrain from producing a comparable list here. 11. Naficy reminds us that ‘the first generation of Jews and Jewish immigrants, primar-

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ily from Eastern Europe and Russia, [were] dubbed the Hollywood “pioneers” ’ (2001: 7). Moreover, many German (Jewish) and other European émigrés went to Hollywood in the 1920, not as exiles or refugees but because they were attracted by the superior technology, resources and opportunities that Hollywood afforded them. 12. The term ‘double consciousness’ goes back to W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Strivings of the Negro People’ (1897), subsequently revised for The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois describes ‘two warring ideals in one black body’: that is, an internally divided diasporic self, resulting from conflicting cultural and ethnic affiliations. See Gilroy (1993a) for a discussion of ‘double consciousness’ in a contemporary context. 13. ‘The term “Non-Resident Indian” generally refers to the post-1960s migrants from India to Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States. The profile of the NRI changed since the 1990s, when a U.S. immigration reform act tripled the quotas for skilled immigrants, thereby producing a surge in migration from India to the United States. Unlike previous generations of Indians, particularly those who went to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, this new group constitutes a transnational class that has the financial ability to live between their country of origin and place of residence’ (Sharpe 2005: 77). 14. The term ‘Bollywood cinema’ has been widely adopted in the English-speaking world (and beyond) and is sometimes used imprecisely to refer to popular Hindi cinema or even Indian cinema generally. Prasad (2003), Desai (2004), Sharpe (2005) and Gopal (2011), amongst others, use ‘Bollywood’ to denote a globalised form of popular Hindi cinema that circulates transnationally, is watched by Indians at home and abroad, and has a following amongst Western audiences. In contrast to the more general term ‘popular Hindi cinema’, ‘Bollywood cinema’ refers specifically to films that have been made in the context of India’s economic liberalisation and ensuing economic and cultural globalisation that has fundamentally transformed India – and commercial Indian cinema – since the early 1990s.

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1. FAMILY MATTERS IN DIASPORA

What is a family and how is it defined? We tend to conceive of the ‘family’ as a self-explanatory concept, although its meaning is contested and perpetually shifting to reflect changing family structures over time and across different cultures. The focus of this book is on the representation of the diasporic family in contemporary European cinema, rather than on the social reality of this particular type of family. Nevertheless, in order to demarcate the boundaries of the present study, it will be necessary to clarify the conjoined concepts of ‘diaspora’ and the ‘family’, by drawing on disciplines such as sociology and anthropology, as well as on migration and diaspora studies, in order to provide some initial answers to the following key questions: What are the distinctive features of diasporic families and how are they constructed as different in relation to the normative model of the white nuclear family? What socio-historical factors have contributed to the growing prominence of diasporic families in European cinema over the past few decades? The word ‘family’ is derived from Latin ‘familia’, which is a derivative of ‘famulus’ (servant). Originally, the term did not refer to what we commonly understand by it today but instead ‘denoted all the slaves and servants living under one roof’ (Zonabend 1996: 8), collectively called famuli. Subsequently, its meaning was extended to include ‘the entire household, the master, on the one hand, and the wife, children and servants living under his control’ (8). In other words, ‘family’ included the notion of kinship and shared residence. Over time, the word ‘kin’ (persons connected by blood relationship) has become less common and ‘the one term “family” covers all the various groups of relatives denoted by words such as household (all the individuals living under one roof); gens (all those descended from a common ancestor), agnati (relatives on the father’s side) and cognati (denoting relatives on the mother’s side, and then, by extension, all blood relatives)’ (8).1 Thus, families are held together by ties of consanguinity or blood, as well as by conjugal ties between husband and wife, based on some form of social contract (normally marriage). Social scientists distinguish between the conjugal or nuclear family, defined as ‘an intimate, closely organized group consisting of spouses and offspring’, and ­18

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the consanguine or extended family, defined as an ‘almost unorganized group of blood relatives’ (Linton 1959: 33) or kinship group. According to the American anthropologist George Peter Murdock, who analysed around 250 small societies all over the world, the family ‘is a universal human social grouping’ (1949: 2). His definition, dating back to 1949, is still widely quoted. ‘The family is a social group characterized by common residence, economic cooperation, and reproduction. It includes adults of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted, of the sexually cohabiting adults’ (1). Murdock uses the term ‘family’ synonymously with ‘nuclear family’, emphasising, however, that in most societies the nuclear family is part of larger composite family forms.2 He explains the universality of the family by its social effectiveness, which he links to four key functions. Through marriage, the family controls sexuality in a socially acceptable form. The economic function, defined as the combination of sexual privileges, economic cooperation and cohabitation, serves as the basis for marriage and marriage as a precondition for the family. From the family’s reproductive role follows its educational function, the nurture and socialisation of children, which ensures the transmission of culture, language and social norms across the generations. Murdock was convinced that no other societal institution could take over these four essential functions and that life, culture and society would cease to exist without the family: ‘No society, in short, has succeeded in finding an adequate substitute for the nuclear family, to which it might transfer these functions. It is highly doubtful whether any society ever will succeed in such an attempt, utopian proposals for the abolition of the family to the contrary notwithstanding’ (11). Although the French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss confirms the mutual dependency of the family and society when he writes that ‘there would be no society without families, but equally, there would be no families if society did not already exist’ (1996: 4), he nevertheless challenges the hypothesis that ‘the family must be a universal presence, whatever the type of society’ (5). Surveying information about some 4,000 to 5,000 human societies, past and present, he lists a number of counter-examples, including the matrilineal Nayar in southern India, among whom children traditionally belonged to the maternal line and the husband played virtually no role. He also cites alternative family arrangements in contemporary Western societies as evidence that the model of the nuclear family ‘does not fulfil a universal need’ (6).3 In fact, Pierre Bourdieu reminds us that, nowadays, from a sociological standpoint, ‘in most modern societies the nuclear family is a minority experience compared to the number of unmarried couples living together, single-parent families, married couples living apart, etc.’ (1998: 64) and that the heterogeneous social groups called ‘family’ bear little resemblance to the dominant definition of the term. While we are led to regard the nuclear family as natural, it is actually ‘a well-founded fiction’, whose existence depends upon it being ‘collectively recognised’ (1998: 66). 19

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The increasing diversity of family structures since the postwar era, in part triggered by second-wave feminism, the gay civil rights movement and rising divorce rates, cannot be reconciled with Murdock’s influential definition, which tacitly conflates family with marriage and excludes single-parent families or gay and lesbian couples. The latter in particular have been campaigning to be recognised as families, arguing that families should not be confounded with genealogically defined relationships (Weston 1991). As Judith Stacey illustrates in her ethnographic study Brave New Families, advances in contraception and the legalisation of abortion during the 1960s and 1970s changed women’s sexual behaviour and paved the way for ‘the family revolution’, during which ‘the gap between dominant cultural ideology and discordant behaviours generated radical challenges to the modern family’ (1990: 12). The fundamental transformation of sexual mores and domestic arrangements that has occurred in Western societies since the 1960s has made a revision of the narrow and conservative definitions of ‘the family’ imperative. In 1965, the American sociologist and sexuality researcher Ira Reiss reduced the family’s four functions to just one, which he believed to be of universal relevance. He defined the family as ‘a small kinship structured group with the key function of nurturant socialization of the newborn’ (cited in Ingoldsby 2006: 75). Meanwhile, family researcher Bron Ingoldsby (2006: 76) expands the concept further by including children of various ages, both natural and adopted ones. In the wake of second-wave feminism, female participation in the workforce rose significantly, so that women became financially independent of a breadwinner-husband. Consequently, some social scientists propose that the chief function of the contemporary family (and of marriage, if no children are present) is to provide love and affection. The decreased relevance of the economic function gradually developed during the 1950s, identified by sociologist Anthony Giddens as ‘the transitional phase of family development’ (2002: 57). Although a gender-specific division of labour was still the norm, ‘men and women by this time were more equal than they had been previously, both in fact and in law. The family had ceased to be an economic entity and the idea of romantic love as the basis for marriage had replaced marriage as an economic contract’ (57). From there, it was only a small step for ‘intimacy’, understood primarily as ‘emotional communication’ (59), to become the core value of modern family life. Emotional communication is ‘replacing the old ties that bind together people’s lives – in sexual and love relationships, in parent–child relationships and in friendships’ (61). In this ‘emerging democracy of the emotions’ (65), the feeling of love is even proclaimed to be the defining feature of the family. Such a dramatically revised conception of the family underpins the claims of ‘families of choice’. During the Gay and Lesbian March on Washington in 1987, civil rights campaigners wrote on their banners: ‘Love makes a family – nothing more, nothing less’ (cited in Weston 1991: 107). To what extent this famous rallying cry has become a socially accepted ­20

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reality remains to be seen. Certainly, scholars appear hesitant to make the term ‘family’ a catch-all category and there is still widespread consensus that what makes a family is the presence of parents (or, in their stead, grandparents or aunts and uncles) and children, whose nurture and socialisation distinguishes a family from mere coupledom. In other words, while neither marriage nor heterosexuality is postulated as a necessary precondition for being classified as a family, couples without children do not normally count. These considerations indicate that, ultimately, the ambiguity of the term ‘family’ revolves around the dialectical relationship of inclusion and exclusion. Consensus about who is in and who is out is perpetually shifting. Comparative research into families across different cultures undertaken by anthropologists shows that the family, for all its claims to universality and naturalness, is a highly heterogeneous and complex social construction.4 Yet, instead of recognising family diversity, public discourse constructs a ‘powerful myth within the collective imagination’ which persistently privileges the white, heterosexual couple and their offspring as the norm and, thereby, naturalises and normalises the nuclear family ‘as a regulatory ideal that inferiorises and discredits alternative’ family structures and practices (Chambers 2001: 1, 3).5 Moral panics about the crisis of the family make newspaper headlines and push controversial books such as Matthias Matussek’s Die vaterlose Gesellschaft: Eine Polemik gegen die Abschaffung der Familie (The Fatherless Society: A Polemic against the Abolition of the Family, 2006) and Elisabeth Roudinesco’s La Famille en désordre (The Family in Disorder, 2002) on to bestseller lists. Yet, rather than revealing an alarming increase in dysfunctional families or even the total demise of the social institution of the family, such books reflect a resistance to change and alternative family models – as well as a nostalgic longing for a family ideal that never really existed.6 Representations of diasporic and ethnic minority families seem to encapsulate the emotionally ambivalent response to growing family diversity in Western societies. As will become apparent in the course of Far-flung Families in Film, their presence in our midst is charged with fear, fear of an ‘excess of alterity’ (Sartori cited in Grillo 2008: 17) that is perceived to pose a threat to our value and belief systems and to the social cohesion of Western societies. Yet, conversely, we project upon these ‘Other’ families our nostalgic longing for the traditional – and by implication happy – family which once was our own but from which the forces of progress and modernity have expelled us. The Diasporic Family In scholarly literature, the term ‘diasporic family’ is often used interchangeably with the ‘transnational’ and the ‘immigrant family’. All three terms imply transnational mobility; however, in the case of transnational families, mobility can be individual or collective, whereas diasporic and immigrant families are inevitably linked to mass migration movements, whether forced or voluntary. 21

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Migration can occur within the borders of nation-states, typically from rural areas to urban centres, or across national borders. Immigration and emigration both denote transnational mobility – with immigration foregrounding the arrival in the receiving country, whereas emigration connotes outbound direction, away from the homeland.7 Migration can be temporary or result in long-term settlement. Migration always precedes the formation of a diaspora, defined as a recognisable and minoritarian social group that preserves its ‘ethnic, or ethnic-religious identity and communal solidarity’ (Sheffer 1986: 9). But, as Richard Marienstras notes, ‘time has to pass’ before one can establish with certainty whether a community that has migrated ‘is really a diaspora’ (1989: 125). Though not all migrants eventually become long-term or permanent settlers in the destination country, the collective experience of migration is constitutive for the group identity of diasporic populations and, by implication, also for the diasporic family. Etymologically, the term ‘diaspora’ is derived from the Greek verb ‘speiro’ (to sow or scatter seeds) and ‘dia-’ (over, across) (Cohen 2008: ix, Peters 1999: 23). Diasporic communities are, by definition, dispersed across two or more countries, though they do not necessarily have to be ‘scattered to all lands’, as the prophets claimed in the Bible of the Jews, whom many scholars still regard as the ideal or prototypical diaspora (Safran 1991; Cohen 2008). As the concept of diaspora remains inextricably linked to the plight of the Jews after the Babylonian and Roman conquests of Palestine between the eighth and sixth centuries bc and is closely associated with the African slave trade, as well as the genocide and deportation of Armenians and other so-called ‘victim diasporas’ (Cohen 2008), it ‘invokes the imagery of traumas of separation and dislocation [. . .] but diasporas are also potentially the sites of home and new beginnings’ (Brah 1996: 193) and, therefore, entail the positive affective component of hope. In recent years, the concept of diaspora has become so fashionable and widely appropriated that theorists are struggling to achieve a consensus about its distinctive attributes and boundaries. In an attempt to contain the inflationary use of this prodigious term, Robin Cohen, building on William Safran’s influential definition of diaspora (1991), proposes nine features constitutive of the classical notion of diaspora. These include ‘dispersal from an original homeland [. . .] to two or more foreign regions; [. . . and] a collective memory and myth about the homeland’ (2008: 17), which often manifests itself in a nostalgic longing to return. Diasporas are collectively committed to the ‘maintenance, restoration, safety and prosperity’ of their ‘real or imagined ancestral home’ (17). Diasporic communities are further characterised by ‘a strong ethnic group consciousness [. . .] based on a sense of distinctiveness, a common history and the belief in a common fate’ and they tend to have ‘a sense of empathy and solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries of settlement’ (17). While their relationship with societies of settlement may be problematic in a number of ways (through marginalisation, as well as resist­22

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ance to assimilation), diasporas also ‘enrich life in host countries’, contributing not just to the economy but also to creative and cultural pluralism and diversity (17). Paul Gilroy’s seminal study The Black Atlantic (1993), which charts the transatlantic slave trade and subsequent voluntary migrations as the historical background for the emergence of a Black diasporic counter-culture of modernity, serves as a pertinent illustration.8 These considerations allow us to make some further distinctions between transnational and diasporic families in contemporary societies.9 Both types of family are characterised by transnational mobility and multi-locality, which means that they live ‘some or most of the time separated from each other’ yet are held together by ‘a feeling of collective welfare and unity, namely, “familyhood”, even across national borders’ (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002: 3). The geographical separation can run right through the nuclear family, as was common during postwar labour migration to the ‘old Europe’, when men left their wives and children in the country of origin, supporting their immediate and extended families by sending home remittances and visiting their families once a year, at the most. Sometimes, children are left behind or sent back to live with relatives in the country of origin (in the case of diasporic families) while both parents are working in another country. Alternatively, multi-locality may affect only the extended family, whereas the nuclear family lives in the same household. What distinguishes the diasporic family from other multi-local and transnational families is its pronounced orientation towards the ‘axis of origin and return’ (Clifford 1994: 321). This vertical axis between the country of origin and the destination country, the ‘there’ and the ‘here’, accounts for a particular diasporic consciousness. It finds its expression in a strong affective bond, a nostalgic longing to return (though this is rarely put into practice) to an idealised homeland. The myth of the home(land), based on the collective experience, memory or postmemory of migration, is an essential feature of the diasporic sensibility. In everyday family life, this is reflected in ‘a strong retention of group ties sustained over an extended period (in respect of language, religion, endogamy and cultural norms)’ (Cohen 2008: 61). Bryceson and Vuorela have coined the term ‘relativising’ for these ‘modes of materializing the family as an imagined community with shared feelings and mutual obligations’ (2002: 14), while cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996) has theorised such practices as the ‘production of locality’ (see Chapter 4). Whether out of a desire to be with their own people or as a result of social marginalisation, diasporic communities often reside in ethnic neighbourhoods, where families, torn apart in the process of migration and dispersal, are reconstituted or where migrants from the same village or country of origin develop family-like support networks. The Little Italies and Chinatowns in large cities all over the world illustrate this form of diasporic networking and the production of locality. Shops selling particular ethnic foods and clothing, or faith schools that complement or substitute the educational offerings of the host society create a sense of home elsewhere. Transnational elites, 23

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by contrast, frequently display ‘reverse cultural alienation’ by not wanting to mix and socialise with their less educated and less affluent compatriots, choosing instead to live in well-off majority neighbourhoods (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002: 21). More generally, transnational and diasporic families are distinguished by a markedly different sense of place. The anthropologist Ulf Hannerz associates transnational communities with particular occupations (diplomats, bureaucrats, foreign correspondents and so on) and describes their transnational hyper-mobility as making ‘quick forays from a home base to many other places – for a few hours or days in a week, for a few weeks here and there in a year – and as they shift their bases for longer periods within their lives’ (1996: 107). Such individuals and their families conduct their mobile lives from a base or from constantly shifting bases, following ‘the siren call of opportunity wherever it leads’ (Lasch 1995: 6).10 Bryceson and Vuorela draw attention to the class implications of ‘transnational’ and ‘migrant / diasporic’. Families who came to Europe from the former colonies or as part of other labour migrations during the postwar era were predominantly low-skilled workers and belonged to the working class, at least the first generation. The term ‘transnational family’, by contrast, is commonly used with reference to social elites whose international careers make them ‘mobile’ rather than ‘migrant’. They move out of choice rather than out of political or economic necessity and can freely negotiate their places of residence and, frequently, their nationalities too. Such highly skilled, multi-lingual transnationals are much sought after on the labour market and are welcome citizens who can cross borders freely and travel between their multiple homes. Still, without wanting to deny these class implications, it is worth noting that, by the second or third generation, many diasporic families have moved up the social hierarchy (often through considerable investment in the education of their children), so that the distinction becomes increasingly blurred. It would, therefore, be ‘clearly a fallacy to identify the diasporic experience exclusively with the subaltern’ (Cunningham and Sinclair 2001: 12).11 In their article ‘The transnational family among urban diaspora populations’, Rubel and Rosman conflate the two terms and illustrate how frequent inexpensive air travel and the use of email, particular internet sites and the exchange of home videos (especially of weddings and other family celebrations) have facilitated the transnationalisation of diasporic families. Hence, contemporary diasporic families can ‘be in very frequent contact with their kinsmen back home, in contrast to an earlier period when this was not the case and ties would wither’ (Rubel and Rosman 2009: 57). Accordingly, the transnational family would simply be a contemporary version of the diasporic family in the age of globalisation – and it is in this sense that recent studies such as The Transnational Family: New European Frontiers and Global Networks (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002) and Transnational Families: Ethnicities, Identities and Social Capital (Goulbourne, Reynolds, Solomos and Zontini 2010) use the concept.12 ­24

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Nevertheless, I prefer to use the more narrowly defined term ‘diasporic family’ since, rather than being primarily concerned with what James Clifford (1994) describes as the decentred lateral axes – that is, the transnational connectedness of these families across several destination countries, I am first and foremost interested in the vertical axis, the shared experience and / or collective memory of migration from the homeland that has shaped the collective identity of diasporic communities. Most of the films about far-flung families that I analyse in this book privilege the vertical axis by linking the fictional lives they narrate to the postwar labour migrations from Europe’s former colonies. This explains why, in Britain and France, in particular, the notion of diaspora is interlocked with ethnicity and race. In fact, Gabriel Sheffer defines ‘modern diasporas [. . . as] ethnic minority groups of migrant origins’ (1986: 3). Furthermore, black Britons of Afro-Caribbean descent, the South Asians from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh in Britain, and the Maghrebi diaspora (comprising people of Algerian, Tunisian and Moroccan heritage) are identified not only as ethnic minorities but also as people of colour. This distinguishes them, for instance, from Italian immigrants, referred to as ‘white ethnics’ in the US or as ‘cultural minorities’ in Canada (Fortier 2000: 20), and from the Turkish diaspora in Germany, whose status as an ethnic minority is based primarily on religious difference.13 How, then, is the diasporic family constructed as ‘Other’ in relation to the hypostatised norm of the white nuclear family, which ‘remains a powerful ideological device for naturalising hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality’ (Chambers 2001: 13)? Although race is a particularly important marker of difference, not least because it is immediately visible, value and belief systems that determine the dynamics within the family and its interaction with the host society emerge as the most controversial aspects of the diasporic family’s perceived alterity. Ralph Grillo observes that social scientists increasingly contest the notion of the family as ‘a “natural” form of human organisation’, conceiving of it instead as a symbolic system governed by a culturally and historically specific ideology (2008: 16). It is ‘a social construct which entails beliefs and values defining family members and relationships with them. It thus constitutes a moral order, albeit with widely diverse understandings of what that moral order should be’ (16). By focusing on the most extreme deviations from the moral codes of the white hegemonic family, the yardstick against which other family models are measured, the mass media reinforce culturalist assumptions about the ‘Otherness’ of diasporic families.14 Headlines display an almost voyeuristic fascination with honour killings, typically associated with traditional Muslim families and cited as evidence of an irreconcilable ‘clash of civilisations’ (Huntington 1997) between the Christian and the Muslim world. The headscarf and the burqa and other features of Islamic female dress codes are interpreted as visible symbols of gender inequality and female oppression and play an important part in vilifying the ‘Otherness’ of diasporic Muslim families (see Bowen 2007). The practice of arranged marriage conflicts with 25

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Western values of individual self-determination and the ideal of romantic love. Yet those who condemn arranged marriage readily forget that love marriage is a fairly recent invention and by no means a guarantor of a happy and stable family life. Whereas the South Asian diasporic family, imagined ‘as bounded by traditional and patriarchal frameworks’, has emerged as ‘one of the defining tropes’ in the British media (Malik 2012), the African–Caribbean family is often type-cast as dysfunctional and, on account of absent fathers and matriarchal family structures, identified as the root cause of juvenile delinquency in the shape of drug and gun crime.15 In other words, the cultural differences of diasporic families have given rise to some ‘compelling myths proliferated around different ethnic minorities’ (Malik 2012). By contrast, less spectacular examples of alternative family ideologies and practices rarely attract media attention. Many aspects of these alternative family structures and values are classified as ‘traditional’ – a slippery term that means different things to different people and that has acquired predominantly pejorative connotations. Whereas, in feminist discourse, the traditional family is by and large co-terminous with the 1950s breadwinner–housewife model of the nuclear family, with reference to diasporic, ethnic minority families, ‘traditional’ is associated not only with patriarchy but also with pre-industrial family configurations. The premium placed on the family’s economic function in pre-industrial societies meant that large households in which extended families, consisting of three or more generations and usually including aunts, uncles and other relatives as well, were more efficient as units of production than small nuclear families (see Goody 1983). Many immigrants come from poor, rural areas where such traditional family forms are deeply entrenched (see Lacoste-Dujardin 2000, Ewing 2008) and, therefore, transnational migration invariably involves a huge domestic upheaval. Families have to abandon their extended kinship networks and village communities and are expected to adjust to the Western model of the nuclear family. Disorientated and reluctant to let go of what they are accustomed to, many diasporic families cling to social practices and value systems that appear to be out of place in the host societies. For the first generation, in particular, economic and other utilitarian considerations frequently continue to take precedence over romantic love in the choice of spouse; patriarchal power structures and gendered division of labour prevail; female virtue, understood as virginity before marriage and fidelity afterwards, serves as the guarantor of family honour (see Ahmed 2003, Georgas 2006, Giddens 2002 and Chapter 4). The enormous importance attached to family honour indicates that the traditional family places a much higher value on the group and its welfare than on the needs and desires of individual family members. ‘Traditions are always properties of groups, communities or collectivities. Individuals may follow traditions and customs, but traditions are not a quality of individual behaviour’ (Giddens 2002: 41). According to Anthony Giddens, the defining ­26

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feature of tradition is not ‘endurance over time’ but ‘ritual and repetition’ (43). Nevertheless, tradition constitutes an important link to the past in so far as ‘the past structures the present through shared collective beliefs and sentiments’ (47). Through transnational migration – usually from rural areas to urban centres – traditional families find themselves catapulted into de-traditionalised societies with ‘greater freedom of action’ and ‘emancipation from the constraints of the past’ (47). These considerations illustrate how, in discourses on the diasporic family, the notion of tradition is underpinned by the problematic ‘racialized dichotomy of modernity versus tradition’ (Erel 2002: 128). Yet, as already noted above, there is another side to the traditional family. Collectivism and continuity translate into the positive values of nurturing kinship networks and stability, which contrast with the fragmentation and alleged crisis of the hegemonic family. Thus, idealised representations of the diasporic family imagine it as ‘the cradle of original, pristine forms of culture which remain uncontaminated by the “host” society’s degenerate ways of life’ (Fortier 2000: 61). Whether or not ‘traditional’ is interpreted in positive or negative terms is determined by the family’s ethnicity (see Introduction) and by the films’ generic conventions. Put bluntly, while social realist dramas tend to emphasise what makes the diasporic family different from ‘us’, comedies explore what makes them similar. Yet, even if familiar binary structures such as tradition versus modernity, rural versus urban, the home versus host society, the periphery versus the centre and the West versus the rest continue to resonate in public discourse and in artistic representation, in the majority of more recent diasporic family films, they have been superseded by notions of flow and dialogism. Avtar Brah’s discussion of the ‘diaspora space’ exemplifies such a dialogic perspective. She suggests that the diaspora space as opposed to that of diaspora [. . .] is ‘inhabited’, not only by those who have migrated and their descendants, but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous. In other words, the concept of diaspora space [. . .] includes the entanglement, the intertwining of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’. (1996: 209) Brah’s radical critical intervention complicates the insistence upon boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, foregrounding instead the social, cultural and creative dynamics of the encounter. Similarly, in their seminal book Unthinking Eurocentrism, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) propose a polycentric vision, which decentres a Eurocentric perspective by situating diasporic and minoritarian communities not on the margins of a pre-existing nucleus of society but instead at its very core, as active participants in the shaping of a shared – though often conflictual – past, present and future. Arjun Appadurai, too, disavows the notion of centre and periphery and replaces it with a model of disjunctive global flows. These transnational exchanges of people, finance, 27

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ideas and so on occur together but are not systematically related. Appadurai conceives of them in terms of fluid landscapes, which he terms ‘ethnoscapes’, ‘mediascapes’, ‘technoscapes’, ‘financescapes’ and ‘ideoscapes’. Diasporic families form a vital part of such ‘ethnoscapes’, defined by Appadurai as ‘landscape[s] of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other moving groups of individuals’ (1996: 33). In such deterritorialised, mobile communities, affiliations between people are forged that transcend national belonging, race and religion. Whereas some critical frameworks conceptualise diasporic identities in terms of ‘roots’, emphasising the importance of origin, bloodline and descent, others prioritise the notion of ‘routes’ (see Gilroy 1993a; Clifford 1994) and conceive of diasporic identities as complex, hybrid and poised in transition, perpetually transforming and redefining themselves. For Stuart Hall, identity is ‘not an essence but a positioning’ ([1990] 2003: 237). Rather than proceeding ‘in a straight unbroken line from some fixed origin’, diasporic identities position themselves in relation to ‘the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture’ (237). Representing a fundamental departure from the more literal notion of diaspora outlined above, Hall’s conceptualisation culminates in the following famous definition of diaspora and identity: Diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return, even if it means pushing other people into the sea. This is the old, the imperializing, the hegemonizing, form of ‘ethnicity’. [. . .] The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. (244) Hall’s explicitly non-essentialist and non-dichotomous understanding of diaspora has proven enormously influential and resonates, amongst others, with Paul Gilroy’s utopian vision of conviviality (2004), arising from the everyday interaction and cohabitation of many different racial and ethnic groups, which he regards as an ordinary feature of social life in postcolonial urban centres all over the world; with David Hollinger’s idea of postethnicity (2000), which lays stress on voluntary affiliations and the formation of ‘communities of consent’, as opposed to involuntary affiliations based on descent; and with Cunningham and Sinclair’s (2001) trope of ‘floating lives’. All of these approaches propose ways of thinking about diasporic identities that eschew the divisive ‘two worlds’ paradigm. In relation to the diasporic family, they revalorise the notion of difference and conceive of its putative Otherness in positive terms. The ability to access multiple transnational networks, languages and cultures ­28

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puts the diasporic family, at least potentially, in the privileged position of amassing more symbolic capital and transmitting it across the generations than those families who are staying put (see Bourdieu 1998: 23). In fact, it has been suggested that, as citizens of plural worlds, they occupy a pivotal position in