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22 April 2008
European Tribes: Transnational Diasporic Encounters
John McLeod, University of Leeds
Abstract
This seminar presentation will think about the relations between black British diasporic cultures and those in mainland Europe, and explore in particular some of the tensions and problems that emerge when black writers of Britain turn their attentions towards to continent as a whole. Much work has been done in thinking about the ways in which contemporary diasporic cultures across Europe have presented a challenge to illiberal modes of nationalism within distinct, discrete European nations. The axis of encounter, if you will, has been contained within national parameters. But what happens, for example, when British diasporic writers look across national borders to diasporic peoples in France, or Spain, or other such nations? How multicultural is British multiculturalism when set within a European, rather than a strictly Anglophone or British colonial frame? Have any significant itinerant exchanges emerged which have allowed ‘new excitements’ to be nurtured by distinctly trans-European axes of cross-diasporic cultural, and specifically multilingual, engagements? In what ways have British writers, often lauded as cosmopolitan and receptive to cross-cultural fusion, endeavoured to inaugurate pan-European diasporic relations?
In pursuing briefly these questions I will focus on three examples from different moments during the past twenty years. I shall turn first to Caryl Phillips’s early, angry account of a year spent travelling through Europe and (briefly) Morocco, The European Tribe (1987), in which Phillips addresses his ‘anxieties of knowing that I was a member of the larger European tribe, a member who felt uncomfortable at being such, but who had no alternative’ (Phillips 1987: x). Secondly, I shall consider Mike Phillips’s recent musings on Europe and race in his eclectic, predominantly non-fictional book London Crossings (2001). Finally, I shall explore briefly Bernardine Evaristo’s playfully serious novel Soul Tourists (2005), which returns to us Europe in 1987 but from the vantage of a twenty-first century cosmopolitan sensibility deeply aware of the silences regarding black people which may be found in Europe’s many and varied histories. As I shall argue, these examples of black writing in Britain instructively demonstrate some of the possibilities and problems of striking up engagements between and across Europe’s black people. In particular, the challenges faced by black British writers of Europe index some of the difficulties in brokering intra-European innovation and engagement from a (by no means homogeneous) British perspective.
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The Non–Places of Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe
Sandra Ponzanesi, Utrecht University
Abstract
Migrant and diasporic cinema highlights how past colonial legacies and new global dynamics shape the multicultural landscape of European countries, cities and bodies. It addresses issues of space, language and identity also visually and aurally, differently than literature. However, this has also limitations of its own. How do migrant filmmakers - working between cultures - use cinema to transmit the physical sense of place and belonging, the feeling of loss and nostalgia or the memory of a past identity? (Minh-Ha, 1999; Marks, 2000).
The cost of film production and the difficulties of distribution explain the later entrance of cinema as a medium of expression for the migrant perspectives. However, during the last decade, thanks to the digital revolution and the commercialization of film festivals, migrant cinema in Europe (in its many hyphenated variants: British-Asian, French-Beur, Black-British, Turkish-German, Maghreb-cinema and so forth) has suddenly commanded the attention of international film festivals juries, of major newspapers critical reviewers, of national televisions programmers and producers, and of the public at large. This is obviously connected to the raise of transnational cinema in general, in which hybridized forms of production, representation and distribution take place (Haficy 2001; Ezra and Rowden 2006; Loshitzky, 2006) but also to the crisis of Europe as a self-contained entity. This also explains the recent interest of non-migrant European directors in migratory themes, issues and characters, as they are trying to make sense of an increasingly eroded or shifted notion of European identity and to deal with the national ‘colonial unconscious’ and growing racial intolerance within Europe.
In recent films such as Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (UK, 2000), Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (UK, 2002) and Mohsen Melliti’s Io e L’Altro (Me and the Other, Italy, 2007) migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are usually visualised in non-places such as city outskirts, hotels, detention centres, open sea or airports (Augé, 1995), marked in their disposable bodies (trafficking of women and human organs) and in constant negotiation/conflict with hostile media representations (war on terror and religious fundamentalism). Yet, they manage to hint at a model of tolerance and of hospitality that could redeem Europe from its moral panic.
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