Introduction to the diasporic autobiographical documentary | Intellect Skip to content
1981
Volume 1, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 2632-5853
  • E-ISSN: 2632-5861

Abstract

This article aims to introduce a new film genre that I call ‘diasporic autobiographical documentary’ that I have been working on during my last years of research, first in France and now in a broader context. In this genre, diasporic cinema and autobiographical documentary meet and create an original ensemble, especially produced in the last twenty years, in order to give place to the search for identity by individuals belonging to more than one nation and culture. In the first part, the present text exposes the principal axes of definition of this body of work, following Raphaëlle Moine’s theory of film genre. In the second part, it deals with two concepts necessary to understand the main issues of this genre: the diasporic subject and the origin. In the search of their lost origin and of their collective memories, diasporic subjects negotiate their identity through the subjective enunciation of the documentary, and offer an important work of reflection on today transnationalism and multiculturalism.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/gdm_00007_1
2020-06-01
2024-04-25
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Benjamin, Walter (2009), Origine du drame baroque allemande (trans. S. Muller), Paris: Flammarion.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Berghahn, Daniela (2013), Far-Flung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Berghahn, Daniela and Sternberg, Claudia (eds) (2010), European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Bruss, Elizabeth (1980), ‘Eye for I: Making and unmaking of autobiography in film’, in J. Olney (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pres, pp. 296320.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Bruzzi, Stella ([2000] 2006), New Documentary, London and New York: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Cho, Lily (2007), ‘The turn to diaspora’, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 17, Spring, pp. 1130.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Choquet, Sabine (2015), Identité Nationale et Multiculturalisme: Deux Notions Antagonistes?, Paris: Classiques Garnier.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Cincinelli, Sonia (2012), Senza Frontiere: L’immigrazione nel cinema italiano, Rome: Edizioni Kappa.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Diawara, Manthia (1993), Black American Cinema, London: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Diawara, Manthia (1999), ‘The “I” narrator in black diaspora documentary’, in P. R. Klotman and J. K. Cutler (eds), Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 31528.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Durham Peters, John (1999), ‘Exile, nomadism, and diaspora: The stakes of mobility in the western canon’, in H. Naficy (ed.), Home, Exile, Homeland. Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 1741.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Goursat, Juliette (2016), Mises en « je »: Autobiographie et film documentaire, Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Grange, Marie-Françoise (2008), L’autoportrait en cinéma, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Hage, Ghassan (2017), ‘Diaspora and migration’, in I. Szeman, S. Blacker and J. Sully (eds), A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 191204.
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Hake, Sabine and Mennel, Barbara (eds) (2014), Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium. Sites, Sounds, and Screens, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Higbee, Will (2013), Post-Beur Cinema: North African Emigré and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France Since 2000, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  17. hooks, bell (1992), Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston, MA: South End Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Klotman, Phyllis R. and Cutler, Janet K. (eds) (1999), Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Lane, Jim (2002), The Autobiographical Documentary in America, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  20. Lebow, Alisa (ed.) (2012), The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary, New York: Columbia University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Loshitzky, Yosefa (2010), Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  22. Loustaunau, Esteban E. and Shaw, Lauren E. (eds) (2018), Telling Migrant Stories: Latin American Diaspora in Documentary Film, Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  23. Marks, Laura U. (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  24. Moine, Raphaëlle (2008), Les genres du cinema, Paris: Armand Colin.
    [Google Scholar]
  25. Naficy, Hamid (ed.) (1999), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, New York and London: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  26. Naficy, Hamid (ed.) (2001), An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  27. Ngugi, wa Thiong’o (1986), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, London: James Currey.
    [Google Scholar]
  28. Odin, Roger (2000), De la fiction, Brussels: De Boeck Université.
    [Google Scholar]
  29. Oscherwitz, Dayna (2010), Past Forward: French Cinema and the Post-Colonial Heritage, Carbondale, IL and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  30. Prime, Rebecca (ed.) (2016), Cinematic Homecomings: Exile and Return in Transnational Cinema, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.
    [Google Scholar]
  31. Rachdi, Mohamed (1999), ‘Fabulations oasiennes, exils créateurs’, in T. Ragi (ed.), Les territoires de l’identité, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 21736.
    [Google Scholar]
  32. Ramos, Elsa (2006), L’invention des origines. Sociologie de l’ancrage identitaire, Paris: Armand Colin.
    [Google Scholar]
  33. Rascaroli, Laura (2009), The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film, London: Wallflower Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  34. Renov, Michael (2004), The Subject of Documentary, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  35. Roman, Mathilde (2008), Art vidéo et mise en scène de soi, Paris: L’Harmattan.
    [Google Scholar]
  36. Sibony, Daniel (1991), Entre-deux: L’origine en partage, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
    [Google Scholar]
  37. Stam, Robert and Shohat, Ella (1994), Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, New York: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  38. Tarr, Carrie (2005), Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  39. Watson, Julia (1993), ‘Towards an anti-metaphysics of autobiography’, in R. Folkenflik (ed.), The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 5779.
    [Google Scholar]
  40. Zimra, Georges (2011), Le tourment de l’origine: Le malaise identitaire, Paris: Berg International.
    [Google Scholar]
  41. Scafirimuto, Guglielmo (2020), ‘Introduction to the diasporic autobiographical documentary’, Journal of Global Diaspora & Media, 1:1, pp. 107122, doi: https://doi.org/10.1386/gdm_00007_1
    [Google Scholar]
http://instance.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journals/10.1386/gdm_00007_1
Loading
  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): autobiography; cinema; diasporic subject; documentary; film genre; postcolonial
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error