Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Volume 5, Issue 2-3, 2014

This article, responding to the current crisis of European cultural identity, goes beyond the specific national context of film production in Europe, and discusses how the issues of migration and diaspora are challenging the conflicting, and sometimes conflating, ideas of post-Europe, Fortress Europe, post-Holocaust Europe, New Europe, post-nation Europe and transnational Europe. It asks how the films dealing with migration and diaspora challenge European identity, particularly traditional notions of Europeanness, and how they subvert or/and reinforce hegemonic and counter-hegemonic attempts to construct and deconstruct European identity. Opening a cinematic window onto this struggle, the article determines cultural and political patterns in the representation and negotiation of European identity in several European films from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including Jasmin Dizdar’s Beautiful People (1999), Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), and Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002), Code 46 (2003) and The Road to Guantanamo (2006).

The relationship between migration and food is one that takes many forms. For the migrant in Britain food has played a much greater role than simply providing nourishment on a regular basis. This article illustrates the way in which, for migrants, food has contributed to the construction and perception of outsider identity; how it has been used as a weapon by the racist and xenophobic, yet for other incomers has been the source of entrepreneurial wealth. In addition, it highlights the way in which food has contributed to cultural fusion and cultural separation as well as to religious tolerance and antipathy.

There are indications from both everyday practice and relevant scholarship that new media play a significant role in affecting both the formation and management of dual identities1 for migrants. Nevertheless, there is currently no scientific work that has empirically investigated the effect that new communication tools have on questions of dual identities, and cultural distress more generally. Therefore, an investigation of the impact of new media and technologies (such as free Internet video-calls), both on the integration of immigrants into host societies and the perceptions that those left behind form about destination countries, is timely. This article attempts to address this research gap both by drawing on the results of studies in different fields of research and by confirming consequent assumptions through a qualitative analysis of the usage of new technologies. Different disciplinary studies have demonstrated that those who are able to manage the mechanisms embedded in the formation of dual identity more successfully also experience less cultural discomfort and, consequently, show better patterns of integration in host societies (Butcher 2009; Nowicka 2007; Portes et al. 1999). Following these paths of research, the present study claims that frequent contact with those left behind can both drastically change perceptions of alienation and the cultural distress that immigrants might suffer when they settle in receiving countries, as well as influence the related perceptions that loved ones who are left behind form of destinations. That is, a better management of dual identity issues and the subsequent more successful integration of migrants could also positively influence the views of those persons in the communities of origin with whom they stay in contact through these new communication tools. Therefore, the consequences of using these new media and technologies in terms of both immigrants’ integration and the pictures that those left behind get of host countries will be the main focus of this article. Furthermore, an analysis of the images that companies employ in order to publicize free online video-call software contributes to an understanding of the target market that these companies have, and the needs that they envisage for their users. Thus, these images help us to consider whether the usage of these tools can indeed be related to migratory issues. In addition, an analysis of semi-structured interviews with migrants using free online video-calls will offer an in-depth insight into the effects of using these new communication tools for both the management of dual identities and the integration of immigrants.

This article analyses the poem ‘Sugarcane’, by the Cuban American writer Achy Obejas, in reference to Emily Apter’s essay ‘A new comparative literature’. The connections between these two writings, including their links to certain aspects of Caribbean literary and cultural theory, are explored. The theoretical arguments of Edouard Glissant in particular are considered, Apter and Obejas being put into conversation with Glissant and other theorists such as E. K. Brathwaite in order to discuss the classification of Obejas’s text as a literature of the contact zone. As part of this classification, the ways in which Obejas’s poem elucidates Apter’s project of rupturing the links between language, nation and identity are examined.

This article analyses a recent Latin American film by Luis Mandoki, La vida precoz y breve de Sabina Rivas/The Precocious and Brief Life of Sabina Rivas (2012), whose main character, a 16-year-old Honduran girl, is exploited and prostituted. This article explores the issues of oppression, intersectionality and border crossings as depicted in this film. I examine how this film deals with the portrayal of intersecting systems of oppression (e.g. race, social class, gender and age) and interrelated domains of power (structural, disciplinary, hegemonic and interpersonal) that structure irregular migrants’ experience at the border. Irregular migration at the Guatemala-Mexican and Mexican-United States borders is commonly associated with oppressive treatment and the abuse of authority. Therefore, my analysis of this film also demonstrates the complex ways in which young irregular migrants are subjected to many forms of abuse by the authorities in power at the border-crossings.

This article uses qualitative data to explore Japanese marriage migrants’ preconceptions of Australia prior to their emigration to Queensland. In particular, it focuses on two dominant images of Australia: its natural environment and its multicultural society. I argue that the preconceived images accord with Japanese media representations of Australia, providing examples of cultural texts that reflect such images. Second, I highlight the disparity between anticipated settlement experiences influenced by preconceived images of Australia and actual lived experience. In Japanese migrants’ imagination, multicultural Australia has no racial prejudice or discrimination, and therefore they do not expect to encounter any. However, some migrants have faced adverse experiences that ultimately contest the preconceived image of a harmonious Australia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and some informants avoided discussing racist experiences and some even adopted a defensive attitude. This article lastly explores why some participants find it difficult to share their negative experiences.

Photographs traverse the world in many forms and for many purposes. They follow and trace movements and networks of people, and have become essential objects in linking the past, present and future of migrating communities. Vernacular images, in the home, in academic research are often described as ordinary and mundane; their representational aspects are perceived to be repetitive and unremarkable, for example, family portraits and snapshots. However, this article argues that home (vernacular) photographs are privileged objects and it is their universality and social significance that should elevate their role in social science research. In this article, I will show how photographs, in the social lives of a Gujarati community in Christchurch, New Zealand, have adapted to the migrant context, by helping to secure and maintain vital relationships between the migrant’s village home in India and their Christchurch home in New Zealand. I will argue that photographs adapt to specific migrant contexts and can perform as transitional objects (security blankets) for migrant communities. I use the Chakra Wheel as a visual and metaphorical symbol to help explain the shifts and movements of the photographs presented by the Gujarati/New Zealand participants in this research.

This article argues that Portuguese modernist writer Fernando Pessoa reconceptualizes the nation in modernity. For this, the article explores how Pessoa’s heteronyms (poetic personas) reveal a nationhood of ‘invisible translators’ in a transnational space, for the purpose of cultural transformation. In this way, Pessoa advances with a mapping of the nation that includes diasporas, émigrés, exiles and all of those who, in the Portuguese language, contribute to the transformation of culture from beyond the frontiers and territories of nation states. The heteronyms’ translational dialogue in Portuguese acknowledges the transits of nationals in modernity beyond the national narrative of dispersal in the world found in Luís de Vaz Camões Portuguese epic Os Lusíadas. This Camonean narrative persists as the primordial source of identity for the Portuguese nation, as it portrays Portugal’s oceanic expansion. In contrast, Pessoa’s reconceptualization of nationhood in modernity suggests a nationhood of translational Portuguese in the twentieth century.

Second-hand clothes, advertised as brand new commodities, sold in street markets or small shops are a common landscape of contemporary Dakar. After the economic crisis that has stricken Europe since 2008, and the implementation of FRONTEX, international migration from Senegal to Europe has declined and newer forms of mobility and motility have emerged. The sale of second-hand clothing from China, Europe and the United States seems to be the main resource for some young men trying to access the economic and social space of migrants, and this is a popular outlet on the path to becoming an active member of society by gaining the social and economic status of grown men. The motility of their merchandise through transnational spaces bestows upon these young traders an aura of motility, which increases their merchandise value and their own social status, blending them into the reality of returning migrants. The objective of this article is to open up a discussion about the close link between second-hand clothing commerce, migration and the experience of manhood in contemporary Senegal, taking a cultural approach. The focus of this research is the ways in which young men use the cultural frameworks of migration in the selling of second-hand clothing in order to gain the resources and the social status of men. This article adds to the growing academic research that studies migration not only as a space–time movement, but also as a cultural configuration involving interactions between the structures, contexts and actions of those who move, those who stay and those who receive migrants.

This article will set out to conduct a comparative examination of the inter-war period with the present conflict in the Middle East in the context of human displacement. Through the essays of Hannah Arendt, Georgio Agamben and Edward Said, which deal with the historical plight of migrants, guest workers and refugees, it will deconstruct the nation state in order to delineate its relation to human displacement. Against this backdrop, and after presenting trends on the rise of mega cities and the number of people living outside their countries of origin, it will then argue that visible outcomes of increased globalization include the dilution of rigid borders, interconnected human collectives across nation states and, eventually, inclusive cities – an international system centred on the migrant and not the citizen. The article will conclude by making a case for the rewriting of laws to make the refugee, rather than the citizen, the basis of our political-juridical framework.

‘A Sense of Belonging: Walking with Thaer through migration, memories and space’ introduces and provides a conceptual and affective context to the photographic essay by John Perivolaris ‘Walking with Thaer’. Undertaken as part of the ‘Transational Communities: Towards a Sense of Belonging’ project funded by the AHRC, Thaer led John on a walk from a space he called home in the city to a special place, mapping the spaces and places along the way that were important to him. The process of walking and talking opened up a relational and dialogic space where embodied knowledge, the relationship between the visual and other senses and memories were shared. The photographs and the narrative help us to see the importance of memories, that the past is ‘right here, in the midst of the present’ and that the stories told here also ‘leap forward’ and help to ‘map the future’. In looking at the minutiae, what is ordinarily overlooked, we can often reach a better understanding of the bigger picture – towards a radical democratic imaginary.

Co-Ethnic Strangers: Immigrant Exclusion and Insecurity in Africa, Claire L. Adida (2014) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 188 pp. ISBN: 9781107047723, h/bk, £55.00

Migrant Memories. Cultural History, Cinema and the Italian Post-War Diaspora in Britain, Margherita Sprio (2013) New York and Oxford: Peter Lang, 290 pp. ISBN: 9783034309479, p/bk, £45.00