Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film

Over the last several decades, the boundaries of languages and national and ethnic identities have been shifting, altering the notion of borders around the world. Borderland areas, such as East and West Europe, the US/Mexican frontera, and the Middle East, serve as places of cultural transfer and exchange, as well as arenas of violent conflict and segregation. As communities around the world merge across national borders, new multi-ethnic and multicultural countries have become ever more common.

Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film offers an overview of global cinema that addresses borders as spaces of hybridity and change. In this collection of essays, contributors examine how cinema portrays conceptions of borderlands informed by knowledge, politics, art, memory, and lived experience, and how these constructions contribute to a changing global community. These essays analyze a variety of international feature films and documentaries that focus on the lives, cultures, and politics of borderlands. The essays discuss the ways in which conflicts and their resolutions occur in borderlands and how they are portrayed on film. The volume pays special attention to contemporary Europe, where the topic of shifting border identities is one of the main driving forces in the processes of European unification.

Among the filmmakers whose work is discussed in this volume are Fatih Akin, Montxo Armendàriz, Cary Fukunaga, Christoph Hochhäusler, Holger Jancke, Emir Kusturica, Laila Pakalnina, Alex Rivera, Larissa Shepitko, Andrea Staka, Elia Suleiman, and István Szabó. A significant contribution to the dialogue on global cinema, Border Visions will be of interest to students and scholars of film, but also to scholars in border studies, gender studies, sociology, and political science.

Jakub Kazecki is assistant professor at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. He is the author of Laughter in the Trenches: Humour and Front Experience in German First World War Narratives (2012). Karen Ritzenhoff is professor in the Department of Communication at Central Connecticut State University. She is the coeditor of Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist World (2009) and Screening the Dark Side of Love: From Euro-Horror to American Cinema (2012). Cynthia J. Miller (Emerson College) is the series editor for Scarecrow Press’s Film and History series. She is the editor of Too Bold for the Box Office: The Mockumentary, From Big Screen to Small (2012) and coeditor of Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier and Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (2012), all published by Scarecrow Press.