Homespace, Family and Cultural Reproduction in Three Films about Migration

Dr. Irene Gewdalof

Film studies has seen an increasing attention in recent years to narratives and genres that both reflect and reproduce the ‘transnationality’ of our contemporary context (Naficy 2003). ‘Accented’, exilic and diasporic cinema, it is argued, evoke a state of ‘permanent deterritorialization’, producing cinematic languages of discontinuity and fragmentation, multifocality, multilinguality, and resistance to closure (Naficy 1999). In this paper Irene Gewdalof argues that, in attending primarily to the productive spaces (or non-spaces) of the in-between, there is a danger of underplaying, reifying or just not looking for the spaces of belonging and inhabitance that are also characteristic of an era of transnational migration. As a result, theories of transnational cinema run the risk of closing down spaces for considering the complexities and pleasures of the work of inhabitance, and the investment in the reproduction of ‘homespace’ (bell hooks) that migration, diaspora and transnational experiences might also involve. And since this work of reproducing homes is largely done by women, does this theoretical privileging of dislocation also reinstate gendered binaries? What possibilities are there for a viewer who wants to see the complexities of the intersections of gender/ethnicity/class as worked through processes of making homes in the context of migration; and of films producing a spectator who is addressed as knowing about and taking seriously women’s competencies in the work of reproduction? She develops this argument through an examination of three films by diasporic filmmakers in the UK: Gurinder Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham, Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Last Resort and Amma Asante’s A Way of Life. (In this seminar, though, Bend it Like Beckham will be the focus.)

Bio

Irene Gedalof teaches Women’s Studies and Film Studies, and is Course Leader for the MA Equality and Diversity at London Metropolitan University. She is the author of Against Purity: Rethinking Identity with Indian and Western Feminisms (Routledge 1999). Her publications and research interests are in the areas of identity, power and female embodiment, the intersections of gender, race and ethnicity in white Western and postcolonial feminist theory, and representations of women in popular culture. Her current research is on questions of home, identity and belonging in relation to representations of migrant women, and migrant women’s practices of cultural reproduction.

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk