UNIVERSITY OF

WOLVERHAMPTON
KNOWLEDGE • INNOVATION • ENTERPRISE

Harrison Learning Centre

TRANS City Campus

University of Wolverhampton
THE FI St. Peter’s Square
Wolverhampton
WV1 1RH
Telephone: 0845 408 1631
Online Renewals: www.wlv.ac.uk/lib/myaccount

Transnational
within the de
Bringing t |
films that fasH
or cultural o
technologies^!
in an era no
states, or eve*
increasingly
The readc

• From nfl
• Global (■ Telephone Renewals: 01902 321333 or 0845 408 1631
• Motional Online Renewals: www.wlv.ac.uk/lib/myaccount
• Tourists ■
Please return this item on or before the last date shown above.
Fines will be charged if items are returned late.
When re^J^
borders varid
DOruefbVdllt

the crossing of certain lines generates fundamental shifts in both the aestnetics and tne
ethics of cinema as a representational art.

Contributors: Homi K. Bhabha, Peter Bloom, Robert E. Davis, Jigna Desai, David Desser,
Elizabeth Ezra John Hess, Andrew Higson, David Murphy, Hamid Naficy, Diane Negra,
)ohn S. Nelson, Terry Rowden, Elana Shefrin, Ella Shohat, Ann Marie Stock, Patricia R.

Zimmermann.

Elizabeth Ezra teaches in the School of Languages and Cultures atthe University of Stirling
She is author of The Colonial Unconscious and Georges Melfe The Birth o/the Auleur, editor of European
Cinema, and co-editor of France in Focus.

Terry Rowden teaches in the Department of English at the College of Wooster. His essays
and reviews have appeared in Southern Review, ME1LUS a,,J...
In Focus: Routledge Film Readers
Series Editors: Steven Cohan (Syracuse University) and ina Rae Hark (University of
South Carolina)

The In Focus series of readers is a comprehensive resource for students on film and cinema
studies courses. The series explores the innovations of film studies while highlighting the vital
connection of debates to other academic fields and to studies of other media. The readers
bring together key articles on a major topic in film studies, from marketing to Hollywood
comedy, identifying the central issues, exploring how and why scholars have approached it
in specific ways, and tracing continuities of thought among scholars. Each reader opens with
an introductory essay setting the debates in their academic context, explaining the topic's
historical and theoretical importance, and surveying and critiquing its development in film
studies.

Exhibition, The Film Reader Forthcoming Titles:

Edited by Ina Rae Hark
Color, The Film Reader
Experimental Cinema, The Film Reader Edited by Angela Dalle Vacche
Edited by Wheeler Winston Dixon and Brian Price
and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Hollywood and War, The Film Reader
Hollywood Comedians, The Film Reader Edited by David Slocum
Edited by Frank Krutnik
Marketing, The Film Reader
Hollywood Musicals, The Film Reader Edited by lustin Wyatt
Edited by Steven Cohan
Reception, The Film Reader
Horror, The Film Reader Edited by Barbara Klinger
Edited by Mark Jancovich

Movie Acting, The Film Reader

Edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Movie Music, The Film Reader

Edited by Kay Dickinson

Queer Cinema, The Film Reader

Edited by Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin

Stars, The Film Reader

Edited by Marcia Landy and Lucy Fischer

Technology and Culture, The Film Reader

Edited by Andrew Utterson
TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA,
THE FILM READER

Edited by Elizabeth Ezrd

and Terry Rowden
UNIVERSITY OF WOLVERHAMPTON
LEARNING & INFORMATION
^ SERVICES
CLASS
lllo
CONTROL NO. 7*f/i
tz
DATE SITE

30 Jill. 2007 ill/

■vz#

R Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2006
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

Selection and editorial matter © 2006 Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden
Individual chapters © 2006 the chapter authors

Designed and typeset in Novarese and Scala Sans by

Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

All rights reseived. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Transnational cinema: the film reader/edited by Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden.
p. cm. — (In focus—Routledge film readers)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Motion pictures. I. Ezra, Elizabeth, 1965- 11. Rowden, Terry. III. Series.
PN1994.T685 2005
791.43—dc22 2005016520

ISBN 10: 0-415-37157-0 ISBN 13: 9-78-0-415-37157-5 (hbk)

ISBN 10: 0-415-37158-9 ISBN 13: 9-78-0-415-37158-2 (pbk)
Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, General Introduction:
What is Transnational Cinema? 9 1
i \

PART ONE: FROM NATIONAL TO TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA 13

Introduction 13
1 Andrew Higson, The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema 15
2 David Murphy, Africans Filming Africa: Questioning Theories of an
Authentic African Cinema 27
3 Ella Shohat. Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema 39
4 Jigna Desai, Bombay Boys and Girls: The Gender and Sexual
Politics of Transnationality in the New Indian Cinema in English 57

PART TWO: GLOBAL CINEMA IN THE DIGITAL AGE 71

Introduction 71
5 Robert E. Davis, The Instantaneous Worldwide Release: Coming Soon to
Everyone, Everywhere 73
6 Elana Shefrin, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom:
Mapping New Congruencies Between the internet and Media
Entertainment Culture 81
7 John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmermann, Transnational Documentaries:
A Manifesto 97

PART THREE: MOTION PICTURES: FILM, MIGRATION,

AND DIASPORA 109
Introduction 109
8 Hamid Naficy, Situating Accented Cinema 111
9 Peter Bloom, Beur Cinema and the Politics of Location: French
Immigration Politics and the Naming of a Film Movement 131

*
VI CONTENTS

10 David Desser, Diaspora and National identity: Exporting 'China' through

the Hong Kong Cinema 143
11 Ann Marie Stock, Migrancy and the Latin American Cinemascape: Towards
a Post-National Critical Praxis 157

PART FOUR: TOURISTS AND TERRORISTS 167

Introduction 167
12 Diane Negra, Romance and/as Tourism: Heritage Whiteness and the
(Inter)National Imaginary in the New Woman's Film 169
13 John S. Nelson, Four Forms for Terrorism: Horror, Dystopia, Thriller,
and Noir 181
14 Homi K. Bhabha, Terror and After... 197

Select Bibliography 199

Index 205
Acknowledgments

1. Andrew Higson, "The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema" from Cinema and Nation,
eds. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (London and New York: Routledge 2000),
pp. 63-74. © 2000. Reproduced by permission of Routledge/Tayior and Francis Books,
Inc.

2. David Murphy, "Africans Filming Africa: Questioning Theories of an Authentic African

Cinema." journal of African Cultural Studies 13, No. 2, December 2000, pp. 239-49. © 2000.
Reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis (http://www.tandf.co.uk).

3. Ella Shohat, "Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema" from Feminist
Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, eds. lacqui Alexander and Chandra
T. Mohanty (London and New York: Routledge 1996), pp. 183-209. © 1996. Reproduced
by permission of Routledge/Tayior and Francis Books, Inc.

4. Jigna Desai, "Bombay Boys and Girls-. The Gender and Sexual Politics of Transnationality
in the New Indian Cinema in English” fromSoutfi Asian Popular Culture 1, No. 1, April 2003,
pp. 45-61. © 2003. Reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis (http://www.tandf.
co.uk).

5. Robert E. Davis, "The Instantaneous Worldwide Release: Coming Soon to Everyone,

Everywhere" from West Virginia University Philological Papers, Vol. 49, 2002-2003; pp. 110-16.
© 2003. Revised version published by permission of the author.

6. Elana Shefrin, "Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom: Mapping
New Congruencies Between the Internet and Media Entertainment Culture" from Critical
Studies in Media Communication 21, No. 3, September 2004, pp. 261-81. © 2004. Reprinted
by permission of Taylor and Francis (http://www.tandf.co.uk).

7. John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmermann, "Transnational Documentaries: A Manifesto"

from an earlier version published in Afterimage 1997 (February): pp. 10-14. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher and the authors.

8. Hamid Naficy, "Situating Accented Cinema" from An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic
Filmmaking, Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 10-39. © 2001 by Princeton University
Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
VIII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

9. Peter Bloom, "Beur Cinema and the Politics of Location: French Immigration Politics
and the Naming of a Film Movement" from Social Identities 5, No. 4, December 1999,
pp. 469-87. ©1999. Reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis (http://www.tandf.
co.uk).

10. David Desser, "Diaspora and National Identity: Exporting 'China' through the Hong Kong
Cinema" from Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 20, Nos. 2-3, Winter/Spring/
Summer 2001, pp. 124-36. © 2001. Reprinted by permission of the general editor of
Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities and Post Script, Inc.

11. Ann Marie Stock, "Migrancy and the Latin American Cinemascape: Towards a Post-
National Critical Praxis" from Revista Canadiense De Estudios Hispanicos 20, No. 1, Fall 1995,
pp. 19-30. Reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher.

12. Diane Negra, " Romance And/As Tourism: Heritage Whiteness and the (Inter)National
Imaginary in the New Woman's Film" from Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies,
Routledge, 2001, pp. 82-97. © 2001. Reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis
(http://www.tandf.co.uk).

13. )ohn S. Nelson, "Four Forms for Terrorism: Horror, Dystopia, Thriller, and Noir" from
Poroi 2, No. 1, August 2003. © 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.

14. Homi K. Bhabha, "Terror and After. . from Parallax 8, No. 1, January-March 2002, pp.
3-4. © 2002. Reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis (http://www.tandf.co.uk).
General Introduction:
What is Transnational Cinema?
ELIZABETH EZRA AND TERRY ROWDEN

In its deployment and extension of the idea of the transnational as a critical concept, this
collection seeks to go beyond the primarily economic and sociopolitical origins of the term in
order to reveal its value as a conceptual tool Within the evolving field of film studies. In its
simplest guise, the transnational can be understood as the global forces that link people or
institutions across nations. Key to transnationalism is the recognition of the decline of national
sovereignty as a regulatory force in global coexistence. The impossibility of assigning a fixed
national identity to much cinema reflects the dissolution of any stable connection between a
film’s place of production and/or setting and the nationality of its makers and performers. This
is not in itself a new phenomenon; what is new are the conditions of financing, production,
distribution and reception of cinema today. The global circulation of money, commodities,
information, and human beings is giving rise to films whose aesthetic and narrative dynamics,
and even the modes of emotional identification they elicit, reflect the impact of advanced
capitalism and new media technologies as components of an increasingly interconnected
world-system. The transnational comprises both globalization—in cinematic terms, Hollywood’s
domination of world film markets—and the counterhegemonic responses of filmmakers
from former colonial and Third World countries. The concept oftransnationalism enables us to
better understand the changing ways in which the contemporary world is being imagined by an
increasing number offllmmakers across genres as a global system rather than as a collection of
more or less autonomous nations.

Transnational Hollywood

There are a number of factors that have problematized the category of national cinema. One of
these is the increasing permeability of national borders. This phenomenon is being generated
by the acceleration of global flows of capital and a shifting geopolitical climate that includes,
notably, the end of the Cold War and the creation of the European Union. Another factor is the
vast increase in the circulation of films enabled by technologies such as video, DVD, and new
digital media, and the heightened accessibility of such technologies for both filmmakers and
spectators. However, equally important in the transformation ofthe global cinematic landscape
is the changing shape of mainstream American cinema. Hollywood, which for many critics has
2 GENERAL INTRODUCTION

become a synecdoche for popular film as such, has both influenced and been influenced by the
flows of cultural exchange that are transforming the ways people the world over are making and
watching films.
As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have noted, in the critical discourse oftransnational cinema
“Hollywood” functions as a term meant “not to convey a kneejerk rejection of all commercial
cinema, but rather as a kind of shorthand for a massively industrial, ideologically reactionary,
and stylistically conservative form of‘dominant’ cinema” (Shohat and Stam 1994: 7). Since its
ascendancy around the time of the First World War, the American film industry has systematically
dominated all other film cultures and modes of cinematic imagery, production, and reception.
Hollywood has succeeded in maintaining its hegemonic influence in large part by imagining
the global audience as a world of sensation-starved children. This vision has created a situation
in which the U.S. film industry has perhaps irreversibly committed itself to the production of
empty and costly cinematic spectacles that, in order to maintain their mainstream inoffensive¬
ness, must be subjected to increasingly thorough forms of cultural and ideological cleansing
before being released into the global cinemascape. This homogenizing dynamic can be seen
to function even at the level of individual performers. In the careers of trans- (as opposed to
international superstars such as the Australian Russell Crowe, the Irish Colin Farrell, the British
Kate Winslet and jude Law, the French Juliette Binoche, the Welsh Catherine Zeta-jones, and the
Spaniards Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, national identity has been jettisoned as
a marker of cultural specificity to an extent that goes beyond what might be necessary for the
demands of a particular role. The performance of Americanness is increasingly becoming a
“universal” or “universalizing” characteristic in world cinema.
But although mainstream Hollywood’s key role in U.S. cultural imperialism cannot be ignored,
it is also important to recognize the impossibility of maintaining a strict dichotomy between
Hollywood cinema and its “others.” Cinema has from its inception been transnational, circulating
more or less freely across borders and utilizing international personnel. This practice has
continued from the era of Chaplin, Hitchcock, and Fritz Lang up to contemporary directors like
Ang Lee, Mira Nair, and Alfonso Cuaron. Euro-American coproductions go back at least as
far as the Hollywood-on-the-Tiber, toga-and-sandals epics of the 1950s and 60s. Today, the
transnationalization of cinema extends beyond European and Euro-American coproductions to
include international production centers in, most notably, South and East Asia. In an increasingly
interconnected world, these hybridizing tendencies have become predominant. One of the
most significant aspects of transnational cinema as both a body of work and a critical category
is the degree to which it factors Europe and the U.S. into the problematics of “world cinema.”
Without succumbing to the exoticizing representational practices of mainstream Hollywood
films, transnational cinema—which by definition has its own globalizing imperatives—
transcends the national as autonomous cultural particularity while respecting it as a powerful
symbolic force. The category of the transnational allows us to recognize the hybridity of
much new Hollywood cinema (witness, for example, the importance of Asian martial arts films
to the work of Quentin Tarantino and the influence of European auteur cinema on the work of
directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and, with parodic self-consciousness, Woody
Allen).
Conversely, this hybridity also problematizes the term “foreign film.” In the U.S. and the U.K.
this term has functioned primarily as a signifier for non-English language films. Practically it has
served to relegate those films, and the force of their images of cultural alterity, to the so-called
art-house circuit" and to the select audiences that frequent them. As Jigna Desai has written,
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION 3

“[t]he phenomenon of the art house is based on positioning ‘foreign’ films as ethnographic
documents of‘other’ (national) cultures and therefore as representatives of national cinemas”
(Desai 2004: 39). This phenomenon has served to reinforce the notion that U.S. cinema is the
site of entertainment (i.e., a commodity that people are willing to pay for), while other cinemas
are sites of instruction or edification (a non-commercial art form to which people submit,
with varying degrees of reluctance, or, at best, a sense of cultural duty, in the classroom or the
heavily subsidized specialist cinema). This traditional dichotomy has been complicated, first of
all, by the fact that Hollywood has influenced cinematic traditions the world over, an influence
reflected, for example, in the terms “Bollywood” and “Nollywood" (shorthand for the mass-
market film industries of India and Nigeria, respectively), and in the fact that the majority
of the world’s film industries include American-style action films among their output. The
rigid distinction between globally marketed American blockbusters and worthy-but-obscure
“other” film traditions has also been challenged by the worldwide dissemination and box-office
success of “non-western” films, particularly those from the Pacific Rim (such as Ang Lee’s
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), Zhang
Yimou’s Hero [2002] and House of Flying Daggers [2004], and martial arts films starring Jackie
Chan or jet LI).
$
f

From National to Transnational Cinema

There is no doubt that nationalism has played a key role in the evolution and critical legitimation
of film studies and to varying degrees, national elites have sought to use film to establish or
solidify official cultural narratives. (For example, the notion of the “auteur” as representative
and bearer of national and/or ethnic identity has been central to the international reception and
reputations offilmmakers as varied as Jean Renoir, Satyajit Ray, Lena Wertmuller, Akira Kurosawa,
and Spike Lee.) However, transnational cinema imagines its audiences as consisting ofviewers
who have expectations and types of cinematic literacy that go beyond the desire for and
mindlessly appreciative consumption of national, narratives that audiences can identify as their
“own.” Film is rapidly displacing literature (in particular the novel) as the textual emblematiza-
tion of cosmopolitan knowing and identity. For instance, there are few contemporary novelists
whose names have the international recognition across a range of disciplines and trend-setting
communities as those of filmmakers such as Pedro Almodovar, Lars Von Trier, Wim Wenders,
Ousmane Sembene, Agnes Varda, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Atom Agoyan, and Mira Nair. This
global cine-literacy has been created and made necessary by the degree to which capitalism as
the catalytic agent in the expansion of popular culture has undermined the viability of cultural
or national insularity.
Central to the creation of this cine-literacy has been the proliferation of film festivals as an
alternative means of film distribution and presentation. Although film festivals are usually
instigated by the desire to represent certain types of distinctively ethnic, national, or identitarian
communities in their cultural specificity, the increasing visibility offilm festivals and their growing
impact on international circuits of distribution often serve to generalize the manifestly
particularizing narratives that might actually be presented in the films themselves. Cinema’s
function as what Peter Bloom calls “visual currency” (Bloom, chapter 9, p. 139) is being drastically
reshaped by the possibilities for global and transcultural knowledge that accompany the
movement into transnationalism and that underpin the film festival as a site for the fashioning
4 GENERAL INTRODUCTION

of cosmopolitan citizenship. Although it can be argued that, as a spectatorial object, each film
requires a particular epistemological and referential framework in order to be “fully” readable,
increasingly these frameworks are losing the national and cultural particularity they once had.
Because narrative film as a dramatic medium relies largely on emotional identification to do its
work, the sense of familiarity with other cultures and with the natives ofthose cultures as people
worthy of the two or three hours of intense emotional investment that a given cinematic text
demands weakens the ability of cultural authorities to deploy the binarized us/them narratives
upon which xenophobic nationalisms depend.
As a marker of cosmopolitanism, the transnational at once transcends the national and
presupposes it. For transnationalism, its nationalist other is neither an armored enemy with
whom it must engage in a grim battle to the death nor a verbose relic whose outdated postures
can only be scorned. From a transnational perspective, nationalism is instead a canny dialogical
partner whose voice often seems to be growing stronger at the very moment that its substance
is fading away. Like postmodernism and postructuralism, other discourses that have compli¬
cated the notion of unmediated representation, transnationalism factors heterogeneity into
its basic semantic framework. This recognition of the essentially imaginary nature of any notion
of cultural purity is not, however, unilateral and untroubled. The space of the transnational is
notan anarchic free-for-all in which blissfully deracinated postnational subjects revel in ludically
mystified states of ahistoricity. The continued force of nationalism, especially nationalism
grounded in religious cultures, must be recognized as an emotionally charged component of the
construction ofthe narratives of cultural identity that people at all levels of society use to maintain
a stable sense of self.
Transnational cinema arises in the interstices between the local and the global. Because of
the intimacy and communal dynamic in which films are usually experienced, cinema has a
singular capacity to foster bonds of recognition between different groups, or what Vertovec
and Cohen have called “trans-local understandings” (Vertovec and Cohen 1999: xvii). These
bonds of recognition, however, must not be confused with the false unity imposed by discourses
that lump all sites of local identity together in opposition to some nebulously deindividualiz-
ing global force. Transnational cinema as a category moves beyond the exceptionalizing
discourses of “Third Worldism” and the related notion of Third Cinema, terms that have
become increasingly problematic in a world no longer marked by the sharp divisions between
Communism, Capitalism, and the rest. Third Cinema, initially a site of discursive resistance
to cultural imperialism, soon came to be equated with all cinema made in the “Third World,"
though this conflation was quickly complicated by the presence of neocolonial forces within the
postcolonial world, and by the fact that many “Third World” filmmakers were trained in the West.
Because of the hybridized and cosmopolitan identities of so many contemporary filmmakers,
it could be argued that binary oppositions and tertiary relations have lost even their heuristic
value in the complexly interconnected world-system with which even the most marginalized of
them must now contend.
A certain anxiety of authenticity underlies the notion of culturally “correct” filmmaking, which
assumes a heightened representational access by ethnic and cultural insiders to a stable and
culturally distinct reality. But because transnational cinema is most “at home” in the in-between
spaces of culture, in other words, between the local and the global, it decisively problematizes
the investment in cultural purity or separatism. The failure ofThird Cinema as a sociocritical
discourse to achieve its revolutionary objectives does not, however, nullify the liberating force
that it had in grounding critical counternarratives to the Euro-American image of cinema that
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION 5

was being fashioned as film studies coalesced as a discipline. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
have pointed out, “In relation to cinema, the term ‘Third World’ is empowering in that it calls
attention to the collectively vast cinematic productions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and
of minoritarian cinema in the First World” (Shohat and Stam 1994: 27). However, it is important
to recognize that the term is more relevant from a historical perspective than in the current
global context.
The most critically significant attempt in recent years to recuperate the national as a site for
positive self-fashioning has been the concept of the “postcolonial.” Ato Quayson has proposed
a working definition of postcolonialism as "a studied engagement with the experience of
colonialism and its past and present effects, both at the local level of ex-colonial societies,
as well as at the level of more general global developments thought to be the after-effects of
empire” (Quayson 2000: 93-94). However, as with notions of a “Third World” and “Third
Cinema,” the concept of the transnational also problematizes “postcolonialism” as an attempt
to maintain and legitimize conventional notions of cultural authenticity. Despite its still
significant analytical force in a wide range of critical projects, the concept of postcolonialism
across its many registers has not proven to be as flexible a tool as it initially seemed for charting
the media cultures of advanced capitalism. The post in “postcolonialism” has foundered on
the same terminological shoals as the “post”Tin postnational, which is not strictly or even
primarily a temporal designation, since the postiiational and the national can, and no doubt for
decades if not centuries to come will, function side by side. Tied, despite the myriad attempts
that have been made to broaden its descriptive range, to particular conditions of imperial
oppression, postcolonialism loses its conceptual coherence when it is called upon to provide
analytical grounding for situations that do not have or that have not been defined exclusively by
the imperial or colonial pre-histories of which it has functioned as a deconstructive critique.
Alternatively, transnationalism offers a more muitivalenced approach to considering the
impact of history on contemporary experience owing to the fact that the issues of immigration,
exile, political asylum, tourism, terrorism, and technology with which it engages are all
straightforwardly readable in “real world” terms. And increasingly, this real world is being defined
not by its colonial past (or even its neocolonial present), but by its technological future, in
which previously disenfranchized people will gain ever greater access to the means of global
representation.

Global Cinema in the Digital Age

Ultimately, the conceptual force of a term like transnationalism is determined by a number of

factors, ranging from the permeability of national borders (itself determined by local and global
political and economic conditions) to the physical or virtual mobility of those who cross them.
In a similar way, cinema is borderless to varying degrees, subject to the same uneven mobility
as people. Although Hollywood cinema knows few boundaries, and films from Hong Kong,
Korea, and India are finding ever larger global audiences, most films from the vast majority
of the world’s film-producing countries rarely find audiences (that is, audiences rarely find them)
outside their own national borders. To a large extent, cinematic mobility, like human mobility,
is determined by both geopolitical factors and financial pedigree. Because of their higher
production values and access to more extensive distribution networks and marketing campaigns,
the more heavily financed films tend to cross national borders with greater ease. We must be

4
6 GENERAL INTRODUCTION

mindful of Jigna Desai’s suggestion that even in pirated forms “those films most likely to circulate
transnational^ are those that are more ‘Western friendly’, adopting familiar genres, narratives,
or themes in their hybrid productions" (Desai 2004: 45). Such films function as what Desai
calls “tasty, easily swallowed, apolitical global cultural morsels” (Desai 2004: 90)—in other
words, cinematic Mcnuggets.
Yet, despite these commercial constraints, there has been, in recent years, a significant
increase in accessibility to all kinds of media. Whereas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
immigration brought greater numbers of people together in a physical convergence that greatly
facilitated cultural contact and exchange, in the twenty-first century, convergence is becoming
ever more virtual, not only in technological terms as the coming together of different media
in a single site, but also in the increasing mediatization of cultural interaction. The shocks and
stimuli that Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin located in the modern city are now conveyed
largely through global media such as cinema, television, and the internet. Postmodern jidneurs
now scroll, rather than stroll, and the signs that bombard them come primarily in the form of
product placements and spam.
The globalization of film culture that was prefigured by the development and international
dissemination of the video cassette recorder in the 1970s and 1980s has seen its most
transformative aspects come to spectacular fruition in the rise of digital technology and the
DVD. In their history of the first decade of the video cassette recorder, Gladys D. Ganley and
Oswald Ganley have noted that within ten years of the commercial availability of VCRs
“representative specimens of the entire spectrum of programming available in democracies
[had] penetrated into even the most restrictive nations” (Ganley and Ganley 1987: xi). It was
this technology that lay the groundwork for the emergence of transnational cinema as the
destabilizing force that it has become by providing what we can retrospectively recognize as a
low-tech precursor to the genuinely revolutionary impact of digital video production, projection,
and reproduction. The falling cost of digital filmmaking equipment, which enables individuals
to shoot and edit their own films on personal computers without studio backing, has facilitated
the rise of a culture of access that functions as a delegitimating shadow of the official film
cultures of most nation-states as they have been determined by the processes of screening,
censorship, rating, and critique. Digital technology in all its aspects has enabled a growing
disregard for national boundaries as ideological and aesthetic checkpoints by a range of legal
and extra-legal players, and has functioned to disrupt and decentralize the forces that have,
heretofore, maintained strict control over the representational politics of the cinematic public
sphere.
Consequently, an important aspect of the impact of digital distribution as a catalytic
component of transnational cinema is the extent to which these developments fundamentally
compromise the effectiveness of all types of state or official censorship. As the availability ofworks
by previously marginalized filmmakers increases, these once silenced voices will be able to make
their concerns known with an immediacy and straightforwardness previously unavailable to all
but the most unchallenging cultural insiders or the most fecklessly audacious outlaws. This new
culture of access has also been fostered by the decreasing levels of commercial success that
an “independent” film has to achieve in orderto recoup its basic production costs, as the means
of reproduction become less cost intensive and the capacity ofthe internet and other emerging
media technologies to provide free advertising is exploited with growing levels of sophistication
by minority filmmakers and producers. Although it must not be forgotten that there are still
vast numbers of people across the globe who do not have direct access to new media, it is
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION 7

certainly true that as filmmaking becomes more accessible to disenfranchized cultural groups
and distribution channels become even more flexible, cinema will become increasingly prominent
as a means of global legitimation and cultural critique.

Motion Pictures: Film, Migration and Diaspora

Fundamental to the kinds of cultural critique made possible by widening accessibility are
cinematic depictions of people caught in the cracks of globalization. Transnational subjects
from all levels of the social hierarchy are finding themselves occupying the center of the frame
in a growing number of widely seen films. Transnational distribution in its many forms unmoors
films from their immediate contexts, thereby allowing them to circulate much more freely than
ever before, i.e., to “migrate.” This migratory potential is apparent not only in the very fact ofthe
greater availability of a wider range offilms to a wider range of audiences, but in the prominence
of migration and diaspora as themes within transnational cinematic texts themselves.
The figure of the cosmopolite is being complicated and broadened as migrants and other
displaced people acquire the means to insert themselves and their particular experiences
of transnational consciousness and mobility info the spaces of cinematic representation and
legitimation, necessitating the reconceptualization of naturalized senses of “home." Ironically,
however, immigration as the search for a new “home” undermines the immigrant’s potential
for cosmopolitan identification in the very act of instantiating it. More often than not, trans¬
national cinema’s narrative dynamic is generated by a sense of loss. The lingering appeal
of notions of cultural authenticity and normative ideas of "home” prompts filmmakers to explore
the ways in which physical mobility across national borders necessarily entails significant
emotional conflict and psychological adjustment. As Hamid Naficy writes of what he calls
“accented cinema,” “Loneliness is an inevitable outcome oftransnationality, and it finds its way
into the desolate structures of feeling and lonely diegetic characters” (Naficy 1999: 55).
As a figure within cinematic productions, the image of the displaced person grounds the
transnational both thematically and in terms of global awareness. In such works, loss and
deterritorialization are often represented not as transitional states on the transnational subject’s
path to either transcendence or tragedy, but instead as more or less permanent conditions—
as, for example, in the film Blackboards (Samira Makhmalbaf, 2000), which depicts a group
of nomads forced to travel ceaselessly throughout Kurdistan on the I ran—I raq border. In much
transnational cinema, identities are necessarily deconstructed and reconstructed alongthe lines
of a powering dynamic based on mobility. A soldier deployed in a distant country is in many ways
as much a displaced person as an immigrant who migrates in search of a better life. Such a
sense of being “out of place” figures strongly, for instance, in Claire Denis’s 2000 film Beau
Travail, in which members ofthe French Foreign Legion stationed in Ethiopia appear adrift both
in relation to the local residents who observe their strange ways with bemusement, and in their
failure to establish cohesive relationships among themselves.
In the diasporic imagination, a psychological investment in mobility is usually counteracted
by the emotional construction of a homeland, which provides a foundational narrative of
departure and a validating promise of return. The 2003 film Goodbye Lenin (Wolfgang Becker)
showed that even the fall of the Berlin Wall generated a diasporic nostalgia of sorts, as illustrated
by the mother’s desire for the privations of life in the former East Germany. Indeed, in many
films that can be fruitfully considered from a transnational perspective, identification with a
8 GENERAL INTRODUCTION

“homeland” is experienced and represented as a crisis. However, rather than being something
that is simply transcended or jettisoned as the narrative unfolds, national identity often becomes
a placeholder for idealized sites of cultural memory and imagined social security. In these films
nostalgia for the mother country offers a tenuous refuge, which is constantly challenged by
the constraints and attractions of life in the adopted country, often felt most acutely by the
second generation. For example, in films such as Bend it Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2002)
and East is East (Damien O’Donnell, 1999), first-generation South Asian immigrants in Great
Britain struggle to impose an all-embracing identification with and allegience to a homeland
that, for their children, is less meaningful than the reality of day-to-day existence in the United
Kingdom. Similarly, in Mathieu Kassovitz’s much discussed 1995 film La Haine, young second-
generation immigrants from North Africa, West Africa, and Eastern Europe reject the traditional
values of their families in order to embrace a “French” youth culture inspired by the global
fashion for violent Hollywood films and rap music.
As a lived condition, diasporic identification entails an imaginative leap beyond the particulars
ofone’s own experience. It functions as the postnational version of the “imagined community”
that Benedict Anderson famously theorized' and that Arjun Appadurai invoked when he
suggested that “as groups move yet stay linked to one another through sophisticated media
capabilities [,]... ethnicity, once a genie contained in the bottle of some sort of locality (however
large), has now become a global force, forever slipping in and through the cracks between
states and borders” (Appadurai 1996: 41). Given this interstitiality, it is not surprising that so
many films that problematize national or cultural identity take place in the “non-places” of the
postindustrial landscape—airports, highways, high-rise hotels, and even the ultimate “non¬
place,” cyberspace—those in-between spaces where people are spending an increasing amount
of time and forming some of their most significant relationships (Auge 1995). As human networks
are increasingly connected by nodes and hubs, a term like “on location” actually highlights the
dislocation of most films from any representational relationship to or acknowledgement of
the economic “home” that is making it possible. The phrase “there’s no place like home”
becomes very hollow indeed when so many films are being made (without necessarily being
set) in places like Toronto, Canada and Cape Town, South Africa simply because of the ability
of these cities to stand in for the “homes” that are no longer being called upon to represent
themselves either because they are unionized and/or too expensive or because they are no longer
capable of standing in for a former version of themselves. Moreover, the reliance on Computer-
Generated Images (CGI) to create realistic backdrops forthe action depicted in a growing number
of films further problematizes any connection between the places films depict and the places
where they are made.
Ironically, at the same time that capital, merchandise, information and images are circulating
more freely around the globe, it has been argued that restrictions on the movements of people—
from jet-setters to labor migrants and asylum seekers—are tightening up (see Vertovec and
Cohen 1999: xiii). These transnational subjects, victims ofwhat Slavoj Zizek terms the difference
between “those who ‘circulate capital’ and those ‘whom capital circulates,”’ are increasingly
figured as capital’s by-products or, in the logic of planned obsolescence, refuse hauled or blown
around from one dumping ground to the next.2 As Hamid Naficy has written,

The key words summarizing this postindustrial system—globalization, privatization,

diversification, deregulation, digitization, convergence, and consolidation—are all
associated with centralization ofthe global economic and media powers in fewer and more
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION 9

powerful hands. However, this market-driven centralization masks a fundamental opposing

trend at social and political levels, that is, the fragmentation of nation-states and other
social formations, and the scattering, often violent and involuntary, of an increasing [. . .]
number of people from their homelands and places of residence—all of which are driven
by divergence, not convergence.

(Naficy 1999:127)

This divergence serves to drive people apart economically and politically at the very moment that
they are brought together physically and virtually. Paul Virilio opposes what he calls "residents,”
whom he defines “not [as] those who are stuck at home, but those who are everywhere at home
thanks to their cell phones” to “nomads,” who “are at home nowhere: homeless, migrants
who only have a jalopy to live in.”3 This dichotomy is emblematized in the Steven Spielberg film
The Terminal (2004), in which Tom Hanks plays a man from a fictional East European country
who is forced to live in a New York airport when his passport is invalidated. When a flight
attendant, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, sees the security pager that airport officials have
made him wear, she believes it to be a cell phone like the one she carries with her: what, for her,
enables a kind of hyper-mobility, for him represents imprisonment. She is an itinerant “resident,”
always on the move yet “everywhere at home,” v0nereas he is an immobilized nomad.
As some boundaries disappear, others spring up in their place. The drive to distinguish
among groups never truly disappears; it just gets displaced periodically to reflect the shifting
geopolitical landscape. For example, with the blurring of national boundaries that accompanied
the huge expansion of the European Union in 2004, tirades against asylum seekers reached
near fever pitch in countries such as Britain and France (“Old Europe”), whose national news¬
papers braced their readers against the impending arrival of “floods” of immigrants from former
Eastern bloc countries (“New Europe”). Etienne Balibar has spoken of a “potential ‘European
apartheid’: the dark side, as it were, ofthe emergence ofthe ‘European citizen.'”4 This dynamic
is thematized in the film Last Resort (Pawel Pavlikovsky, 2000), in which a woman from the
former Soviet Union is detained in an asylum center after being abandoned by her mail-order
fiance while attempting to immigrate to the United Kingdom. Another film, Dirty Pretty Things
(Stephen Frears, 2002), focuses on the traffic in human organs to which some migrant workers
are forced to submit in orderto survive in the UK. The experimental film La Vie nouvelle (Philippe
Crandrieux, 2002) is a hallucinogenic depiction of Eastern European sex workers in France
whose objectification is allegorized in images that evoke vampirism and the Holocaust.
Reflectingthe complex political dynamics oftransnational cinema, one ofthe most important
aspects of the essays in this collection is their refusal to fashion it into or champion it as a
utopian discourse. The Coca-colonization of global marketing, the homogenization effected by
mass culture, relies even more fundamentally on the gaps that divide worker-producers from
consumers. By refusing to privilege either the top (as do traditional champions of capitalism)
or the bottom (as do various forms of Marxism and socialism), transnationalism unfolds as an
essentially self-motivated, ?nd apparently amoral, cultural force. Just as postmodernism emerged
as a stylistic (or superstructural) response to the economic contingencies of advanced capitalism,
so transnationalism both reflects and mediates power relations in the postindustrial, digital age.
It prompts us to ask: is the world really “borderless”? There is an upstream and a downstream
to the flows of capital, which are not boundless and oceanic, but instead channeled with great
precision from the large work forcesin the “south” and the “east” toward company headquarters
in the “north” and the “west.” This movement is explicitly invoked in the film Poniente (Chus
10 GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Gutierez, 2002), which depicts the exploitation of migrant laborers who have come from Morocco
and Sub-Saharan Africa to work in Spain, the “West” of the film’s title. In one scene, tomato
growers claim that the price controls placed on their crop by the European Union is forcing them
to lower wages, underscoring the fact that bureaucratic unity among European producers is
underpinned, in this case, by the stark division between the African workers and their Spanish
employers. This film illustrates the failure of the digital revolution to transform the workplace
into a virtual space for manual laborers, the vast majority of the world’s workers, whose digits
remain firmly attached to their hands.

TOURISTS AND TERRORISTS: Pontecorvo at the Pentagon

In a variety of formal and ideological registers, transnational cinema reflects and thematically
mediates the shifting material and ideological conditions that constitute global culture. The
diverse politics ofthis mediation are rendered singularly transparent when cinema is called upon
to represent real-world attempts to shift political conditions by extreme measures. For example,
the screening of Gilles Pontecorvo’s 1963 anticolonial epic The Battle of Algiers at the Pentagon
on August 27, 2003 during the Iraq War (see, for example, slate.msn.com/id/2087628; The New
York Times, September 7, 2003; and The Washington Post, October 31, 2003) revealed the
heterogeneous, and indeed, at times internally contradictory, nature oftransnational cinema. The
fact that the film’s ideological power could be appreciated and appropriated by ostensibly
opposing interests reveals the dialectical tension that powers transnationalism as a synthesis
of the social and conceptual forces that have preceded it.
A significant result of the transnationalization offilm culture is the unparalleled impact it has
had on the production and availability of documentary films and other forms of “committed”
cinema. Although documentaries have been the primary mode of expression for many if
not most “non-Western” or minority filmmakers for decades, for most of cinema history
documentaries have been almost completely unavailable on any consistent basis to all but
the most privileged of audiences. Recently, however, a growing number of documentarians are
finding that the problems with lack of access to avenues for dissemination of their work that
have plagued them for decades are being eased both by the explosion of television channels
and film festivals desperate for increasingly specialized product and by new developments
in digital technology. Greater distribution opportunities have even given new life to “popular”
and “agit-prop” documentary as a form of political critique, as has been made particularly
clear in the global stardom of the documentarian Michael Moore (the blatantly ideological
straightforwardness of whose work, few would argue, relies upon the illusion of directorial
objectivity).
Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/17 was the most widely circulated filmic response to the 2001
terrorist attack on the World Trade Center (not to mention the most financially successful
documentary ever made), and brought to the fore film’s potential to engage with the complex
issue of terrorism. In both their execution and in the counter-response(s) that they legitimate,
terrorism and other types of politically motivated violence function as the limit cases, the negative
underbelly, of transnationalism. It is in its depiction ofterrorism that commercial cinema comes
closest to offering its most ideologically revelatory and analytically transparent imagery and
narrative constructions. The conflation of terrorism with banditry and illicit moneymaking in
many U.S. and European films makes clear the ideologically determined resistance of commercial
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION 11

cinema to the recognition of radical political commitment under any category other than those
of greed and fanaticism. To be sure, 9/11 as a terrorist event is so potent an instantiation of a
transnational counternarrative to notions of American exceptionalism that it has so far been
beyond the commercializing reach of the Hollywood dream machine. At the same time, the
rhetorical deployment and exploitation of 9/11 and the subsequent Iraq war by political officials
and some elements of the American media created a polarizing discourse that turned all U.S.
citizens into potential victims and all “foreigners" into potential victimizers: in other words,
every tourist venturing into the U.S. became a potential terrorist.
Hollywood as the standard-bearer for popular film as a world system has so far proven itself
capable of coopting the forces ofhybridity and difference effectively enough to avoid breakdown
or the significant loss of its global hegemony. In order to maintain its homogenizing imperative,
it must consistently neutralize transnational cinema’s more fundamentally destabilizing
potential. It has traditionally done this by constructing non-Western subjects as “others” and by
rendering the markers of non-Western cultural identity as “exotic.” The significance of crossing
borders varies according to the identity ofthe traveler, most often along color-coded, gendered,
and religious lines. For example, in U.S. and European films, white women travelers are usually
positioned as tourists, while white male travelers are presented as either figures of salvation
or as James Bond-like adventurers. Non-Western/European and non-north American women or
women of color, on the other hand, are usually represented as immigrants, while men of color
are increasingly depicted as terrorists. If a white male traveler acts violently, it is likely to be in
the guise of an action hero, with whom audiences are meant to identify, while similar actions
performed by a brown-skinned character are usually signs of the violence and villainy that
the narrative is devoted to eradicating. As the film franchise Mission Impossible makes clear,
subterfuge and disguise may be associated either with an “international man of mystery” orwith
an international terrorist, according to the vagaries of pigmentation.
For instance, because of its status as an ideologically unstable site within the touristically
fetishized space of “The British Isles,” the ambivalence with which the situation in Northern
Ireland has been dealt cinematically (see, for example, Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the
Father or Neil Jordan’s The Crying Came) reflects the general reluctance of Western elites to
complicate the racial indexicality of the term “terrorist” as a marker for the potential contagion
of “Third World” and implicitly religious alterity. Similarly, the infrequency with which global
sites other than European ones are used as the backdrop for Western romances reflects
the covert positioning of non-white (and especially Muslim) spaces as essentially dangerous and
unstable. This positioning makes the terrorist and his Euro-American and, most frequently,
white counterpart, the adventurer, signature figures for cinematic depictions of contact with
the non-Western world.
As the essays in this collection ultimately suggest, and as scores oftransnational films have
illustrated in various generic modes, leaving one’s homeland entails leaving behind both
physically and emotionally the familiarity that home implies. This leave-taking often entails, to
use Freud’s term, a becomipg-unheimlich both to oneself and to those who are variously invested
in the diasporic subject’s remaining recognizable. The argument is often made that ifthe citizen
is by definition the subject who must be recognized, transnationalism can quickly lead to the
production of subjects who are, in many ways, beyond recognition. Regardless ofthe ultimate
tenability of this position, it is certainly no coincidence that transnational awareness is coming
to the fore at the very moment when “cosmopolitanism” is becoming one ofthe key tropes for
contemporary identity. As the primary artistic instantiation of cosmopolitanism, cinema itself
12 GENERAL INTRODUCTION

is at home everywhere, and unlike the immigrant, the terrorist, or the refugee, must imagine itself
as a welcome guest.

Notes

1 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991).
2 Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002), p. 83.
3 Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, Crepuscular Dawn, trans. Mike Taormina (New York:
Semiotext(e), 2002), pp. 70 and 71.
4 Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002), p. ix.
PART ONE

FROM NATIONAL TO
TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA

Introduction

The essays in this section provide a historical and conceptual overview of the shift that is taking
place in film studies from conceptions of cinema and cinema history grounded in ideas
of national identity to recognition and deploymentofa new paradigm. This paradigm is one that
recognizes the heuristic (and affective) force of the concept of “national” cinema, while empha¬
sizing the complex constructions of identity, citizenship, and ethics both represented on screen
and created in the film industry’s transnational networks of production, distribution and
reception. As the writers whose work we include in this section make clear, one of the central
aspects of transnationalism as a critical discourse is its dialectical engagement with—rather
than simple rejection of—ideas of the national. Yet, at the same time, these essays reflect the
degree to which concepts like Third Cinema, postcolonial cinema, and world cinema have been
conceptual way stations on the path to recognition ofthe globalizing imperative that has always
been a signal component of cinematic production and of the cinematic imagination. Although
all of these writers accept the practical necessity of national identity and self-recognition, they
each consider the ways in which notions of the national can serve to obscure awareness of the
often mystified and ideologically determined dynamics of national culture and authenticity.
In his essay “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” Andrew Higson explores and
finally rejects the notion of the “national” as the master term in considering the contemporary
politics of “world” cinema. By both deploying and contesting Benedict Anderson’s notion of
“imagined communities” which “imagines the nation as limited, with finite and meaningful
boundaries,” Higson suggests that “when describing a national cinema, there is a tendency to
focus only on those films that narrate the nation as just this finite, limited space, inhabited by a
tightly coherent and unified community, closed offto other identities besides national identity.”
By way of a carefully proposed set of questions that he presents to nationalist thinking, and an
essentially deconstructive engagement with the arguments of those critics who have attempted
to answer them, Higson concludes that a stable notion of the national cannot fully or even
adequately account for the fundamental role played by globalization in much if not most
contemporary film production and reception. As Higson makes clear, now more than ever the
national is fully imbricated within the transformative and, for the national subject, often
destabilizing dynamics of modernity and transcultural contact.
14 FROM NATIONAL TO TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA

Alternatively, by way of an examination of African film, still perhaps the most underviewed
body of cinema both within African nation-states and internationally, David Murphy argues for
the continued use value of postcolonialism as a framework for considering the cultural dynamics
of modernity in a postnational context. Murphy considers the ways in which the concept
of “authenticity” has, on the one hand, served to prevent the collapse of cultural distinctive¬
ness into a blandly universalizing notion of world cinema, while at the same time valorizing
problematic notions of an essential African alterity and exoticism and of Africa as a cultural
space that is fundamentally unreadable for Westerners. In a passage that is very suggestive for
considerations of transnational cinema in general, Murphy writes that “[cultural influence is
not simply a one way street with the West influencing the rest. Africa and the West are not
mutually exclusive worlds that possess their own authentic and unchanging identities: they are
hybrid entities that influence and modify each other, and this process of exchange applies
to cinema (although in the current world order, the West remains the dominant force in this
process of hybridization).” Murphy’s essay makes clear that transnationalism need not be
considered a strict alternative to or rejection of postcolonialism (just as it is not a rejection of
the national), but instead builds upon and extends postcolonialism’s critical force.
Ella Shohat also offers a critique of homogenizing discourses of postcolonial identity, but
from a feminist perspective. In her essay “Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation and
the Cinema," she examines the complexity of global networks ofdomination in the transnational
era, which finds forceful articulation in films and videos by independent women filmmakers.
Such works recognize both the impact of the colonial legacy on feminism and the importance
of feminist critiques of racialized inequality. Shohat argues that these works “challenge the
masculinist contours of the ‘nation’ in order to continue a feminist decolonization of Third-
Worldist historiography, as much as they continue a multicultural decolonization of feminist
historiography.” Shohat at once emphasizes the particularities and diversity of local struggles
for gender equality, and recuperates gender and sexuality from the universalizing narratives
of national history, in an attempt to open up an alternative critical space within “this historical
moment of intense globalization and immense fragmentation.”
The final essay in this section also insists upon the pivotal role of gender in filmic repre¬
sentations of postcolonial society. In “Bombay Boys and Girls: The Gender and Sexual Politics
of Transnationality in the New Indian Cinema in English,” Jigna Desai traces the emergence
of the new wave of English-language cinema from India’s “cosmopolitan transnational middle
class,” which both represents and appeals to South Asian diasporic communities. These
independent, low-budget films present an alternative to the dominant “Bollywood” model,
both in the way they are produced and in terms of their alternative gender politics. Desai argues
that “the socio-economic power relations between diasporas and nation-states are highly
gendered and sexualised,” and the films she analyzes illustrate this imbrication by offering a
critique of narratives of heteronormative romance that allegorize the complex relations between
diasporic communities and the Indian nation-state.