Claudia Sternberg

Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe

Migrant and diasporic cinema in contemporary Europe is situated at the interface of the discursive fields of European cinema and World Cinema. The films discussed in this volume play a crucial role in the gradual conflation of these two critical paradigms and are indicative of the World Cinema turn which film studies has witnessed since the late 1980s.1 In this chapter we attempt to demarcate some of the conceptual boundaries of migrant and diasporic cinema in relation to overlapping terminologies and frameworks to be found in a growing corpus of related critical writing. We examine their heuristic value and socio-political implications by drawing attention to the inflections and subtexts of social categorisation (Migrantenkino), racial or ethno-national emphases (cinema du metissage, black and Asian British film, French beur cinema), linguistic or spatial concepts (accented cinema, banlieue films, cinema of double occupancy) and transnational approaches (Third Cinema, black film, cinema of the South Asian diaspora). Representational strategies and aesthetic choices as well as questions of authorship and ownership lie at the heart of our exploration of the ways in which this new type of European cinema has been understood and named.

Migration, Diaspora and Metacinematic Reflection

This chapter is an investigation into the representation of cinema-going and the use of cinema-related elements in narrative films about migration and/or diasporas in Europe. It has been prompted by the prominence of references to films, film-making and the cinema in a number of European productions created by both migrant and non-migrant, diasporic and non- diasporic writers and directors. Using a sample of such productions from Britain, France, Germany and Spain, I aim to show that, while cinema scenes, citations, intertextual allusions and other metacinematic reflections can be read as postmodern strategies of pastiche and media reflexivity, they also – and perhaps more specifically – draw attention to the importance of film in the migratory and diasporic experience and its central role in and for discourses of ethnicity, ‘race’, belonging and displacement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My argument is that metacinematic elements address historical and metaphorical connections between migration and the moving image; they furthermore help to constitute migrant or diasporic subjects not only as characters in but also as spectators, performers and makers of films, thus defying objectification and foregrounding agency through metareflexive practice.

Nurse-Martyr-Heroine: Representations of Edith Cavell in Interwar Britain, France and Belgium

After her 1915 execution in occupied Brussels for her role in organizing an escape network for French and British soldiers, British nurse Edith Cavell became a household name, and her fame as a ‘martyr-heroine’ persisted in the decades following the Armistice. This article compares and contrasts a range of sculptures, monuments and films featuring Edith Cavell that were produced during the interwar years in Britain (and what were then the Dominions), France and Belgium. Whereas existing studies of Edith Cavell have tended to focus on those produced in the Anglophone world, and to argue that she is universally made to embody female martyrdom against a ‘barbarous’ enemy, this article reveals that the different and evolving national and political contexts in which these cultural representations were produced resulted in important variations in the ways in Cavell was depicted.

The Great War, Memory and Ritual: Commemoration in the City and East London, 1916–1939

respectively), and the diurnal rhythm of day through night. It is unsurprising that this ambitious attempt at ‘thick’ narrative falters at times, particularly the layer of daily events in chapter 4 in which ‘time’ collapses into day and night. However, this is richly compensated for in the success of geographical, authorial, and media analysis throughout, and that of the calibrated timetable of daily business in chapters 1–3 especially. An example of how the book is enhanced by its division into morning, afternoon, and evening chapters onWellington Street is that the evening chapter takes in the presence of the Lyceum Theatre and its performances, a common destination of the street’s habitués, but also a discussion of Mayhew’s performance as a conductor of his investigative interviews, the loss of anonymity of his subjects, and the complex relation between public and private in a street of renowned figures who also inhabit the local. For readers alert to style, Shannon’s book offers many pleasures. She writes well; there is a recurring light touch, in the chapter headings for example that echo those of picaresque fiction: ‘Chapter 2: “Dissolute and Idle Persons”. Furthering our acquaintance with Reynolds, and proposing that radical writers like to step off the page and on to the streets’. The use of illustration is generous, and varied, with helpful maps, prints, and photographs. And, not least, in such a densely and widely referenced work, it is footnoted, rather than endnoted, which further adds to the author’s evidence base. Another pleasure is Shannon’s steady gaze at what is primarily a network of literary figures as journalists, and in their capacity of editing and writing journalism. Thus, she bravely represents democratically a plethora of less universally renowned figures with a very famous one, in a heady mixture of Dickens, Reynolds, Mayhew, Horne, and Clarke. For those who savour such things, there are close readings of their oral and written discourse, but also of their leisure activities, their arrivals and departures, and their business and social lives. A nuanced comparison of the types of ‘radical’ politics of Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew and their publications emerges. To conclude her study, Shannon returns to Dickens, and his model of a wide and intricate network in Bleak House. One facet of Shannon’s absorbing and delightful book is its truly multidisciplinary scope; geographers and literary students alike, book and media historians, as well as social historians, will all learn from this study of a street, a node in a network of mid-Victorian print culture.

Domestic Fiction(s) Ehe und Partnerschaft bei Jane Austen, den Brontës und George Eliot

Brautwerbung, Heirat und Ehestand gehoren zum festen Repertoire der dome-stic fiction, aber auch Verweigerung, Trennung und Altjungfernschaft zahlen zu den Themen jener Subgattung des Romans, auf der die englischen Autorinnen Jane Austen (1775–1817), Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48) und Anne (1820–49) Bronte sowie George Eliot (1819–80) ihren Erfolg begrundeten. Bereits seit dem 18. Jahrhundert hatte sich fur Frauen der mittleren und gehobenen Schichten das professionelle Schreiben als Betatigungsoption eroffnet. Zu ihrer starkeren Beteiligung an einem schnell wachsenden Buch- und Zeitschriftenmarkt hatten die Verbesserung der Madchenbildung, mehr Freizeit und ein erstarkendes Selbstbewustsein beigetragen. Finanzieller Erfolg war aber ebensowenig vorhersagbar wie die Drucklegung selbst: Jane Austens erste Fassungen fur die spater erscheinenden Romane Kloster Northanger (1817) und Stolz und Vorurteil (1813) wurden zunachst nicht gedruckt; Verstand und Gefuhl (1811) wurde vom Verleger nur auf Kommissionsbasis ubernommen. Die Brontes musten fur ihre erste Publikation, einen Gedichtband (1846), in Vorkasse gehen; das Buch verkaufte sich nicht. Charlotte Brontes erster Roman, Der Professor (1857), fand keinen Verleger. Der Durchbruch gelang ihr 1847 mit Jane Eyre; im gleichen Jahr erschienen auch Emilys Sturmhohe und Annes Agnes Grey. George Eliot hatte sich als Ubersetzerin, Redakteurin, Essayistin und Kritikerin etabliert und konnte fur ihre Prosa auf bereits bestehende Verlegerkontakte zuruckgreifen.