Arezou Zalipour

Modes of Engagement Among Diasporic Audiences of Asian New Zealand Film

The formation of a diasporic community within a host society may be signalled through community members’ creative contributions in the realm of cultural production. The ways in which diasporic audiences engage with diasporic cultural texts potentially offers social and cultural trajectories of their understandings of themselves as they negotiate their new environment. This article examines these trajectories, focusing on the ways New Zealand audiences of Asian descent engage with Asian diasporic films. It addresses three key questions: How do audiences’ referential reflections on diasporic films intersect with and contribute to their diasporic journeys and perceptions of themselves in New Zealand society? What kinds of values and beliefs do diasporic audiences feel are important to affirm and negotiate, both within representations of diasporic communities and in their New Zealand-based lives? And what roles do diasporic films play in this ongoing negotiation process?

Diasporic films and the migrant experience in New Zealand: A case study in social imagination:

Drawing upon interviews and focus groups with Asian migrants, this article interrogates responses to ‘diasporic’ films that seek to represent multicultural experiences in contemporary New Zealand. We argue that these responses provide an effective demonstration of the operation of the ‘social imagination’, a discursive process that articulates the fundamental linkage between symbolic representation, community formation and social action. As our respondents narrated the personal meanings that they construct around ethnically specific media, they were compelled to describe known and hypothetical others, to elucidate symbolic and moral codes, and to reveal social empathies and anxieties. In this study, we found that discussions around migrant stories revealed a series of deeply personalised notions of self and place that were always situated in juxtaposition with externalised projections of community formation and the ‘mainstream’ culture. This dynamic reflects what can be conceptualised as the central preoccupations of a ‘diasporic social imagination’. These responses, therefore, constitute a case study of social imagination at work in a multicultural context, underlining the utility of narrative media in providing a public forum for discussing cultural diversity.

Women, Religion, and Food: Indian Diasporic Film in New Zealand

Settling into a new society and wishing to have a visible presence in that new environment are goals that require differing performances of the self. To be accepted in an unfamiliar culture it can be helpful to minimize the difference between one’s self and the existing inhabitants, while, to gain visibility, it is typically advantageous to retain, and to present, an intriguing degree of difference. This article, which looks at how the combination of religion and food forms a convenient representational nexus for both of those goals, is drawn from our study, conducted in New Zealand, that investigates the role that diasporic filmmakers play in public culture. Our study focuses on the film Apron Strings (2008, directed by Sima Urale), which was written by Shuchi Kothari, a member of the Indian diaspora and one of several Asian female filmmakers bringing new textures to the New Zealand screen (Zalipour). Apron Strings is Kothari’s first feature, but she has previously been associated with two other projects: the documentary A Taste of the Place (2001, directed by Susan Pointon) and the short film Fleeting Beauty (2005, directed by Virginia Pitts). Both of Kothari’s early projects also deal with food as a medium for both intercultural engagement and the support of self as well as the formation of group identities through connections with religiosity. The responses of members of the Indian community to the experience of viewing the film and the issues it raises round out our study into this developing area of mediated public culture. Food enjoys profound symbolic meaning in Apron Strings where, as the metaphorical title implies, it is primarily associated with female characters and nurturing relationships; furthermore, its specific connotations are related to aspects of the cultural and religious identities of the women in the film. The effect is that the interplay of food and religion is posited as being of significance in exploring dimensions of diasporic identities. However, while the conflation of food and religiosity may be important in the film’s diegesis, that does not ensure the same result for its audiences. In this article, we are also interested in exploring the ways in which a primarily female audience from the same diasporic group interacts with the film’s reflections on culture and identity. What does it prompt them to talk

Interstitial and collective filmmaking in New Zealand: the case of Asian New Zealand film

There has been an emerging group of filmmakers of Asian descent whose films instantiate diasporic filmmaking in the New Zealand context. In the Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand 2 (2015), this nascent body of films has been conceptualised as ‘Asian New Zealand film’ as their diegeses are primarily based on various aspects of diasporic experience and life in New Zealand. This article examines the modes of production of this group of films within the context of the New Zealand film industry and society, and explores some of this work as examples of the interstitial and collective modes of production that for noted scholar Hamid Naficy demarcate diasporic filmmaking – or what he terms as ‘accented cinema’. Asian New Zealand films both do and do not fit interstitial and collective filmmaking, as they have been made within a variation of modes of production and distribution conditioned by the social, cultural, historical and national regimes that regulate the processes of cultural production in New Zealand. Examining the forces that regulate production and distribution of these films offers us new ways of thinking about the effects of the underlying relationships that can be developed to facilitate diasporic filmmaking as a potential benefit to the economy and also a way to respond to cultural diversity in New Zealand.

Book Review: Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences

Review(s) of: Beyond the screen: Emerging cinema and engaging audiences, by Sarah Atkinson, New York: Bloomsbury, 2014; 312 pp. ISBN: 9781623566371, A

Book Review: Directory of World Cinema: IranJahedParviz (ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Iran, Intellect, Bristol, 2012, ISBN 9 7818 4150 3998, 293 pp., £15.95.

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Developing a Critical Response, Avoiding Plagiarism among Undergraduate Students

No. 145 — November 2012 In fact, it is not so much the quality of the chapters that makes the Handbook difficult to appreciate, but the manner in which it is structured without any general introduction, or any introductions to the regional sections into which it is divided. As such, while the editor John Allen Hendricks explains that the purpose of the handbook is to ‘survey the issues that have confronted the radio industry in the past as well as issues that are confronting the radio industry presently from a global or international perspective’ (p. xxxii), it is up to the reader to apply this perspective. Perhaps this is to be expected of a reader seeking something between ‘a work of reference and a textbook’, but it does seem like an unduly and unnecessarily large commitment to read all of the chapters in order to assemble one’s own ‘global’ picture. Having completed this task, I can attest that many of the issues that recur through the chapters are fascinating. They include the role radio played in World War II, the use of radio as a tool of control and resistance, the difficulties national governments are having in settling upon the specifications of new digital technologies, and the viability of new business models being deployed by commercial radio broadcasters. The decision not to address these themes in a systematic manner in the text seems a lost opportunity.