Throughout the decade which I have spent living in the United States, I have often pondered the following: Why is it that the image that Americans seem to have of Cuba is, for the most part, a nostalgic-based one, seemingly fueled by a desire to return to a pre-revolutionary period where the island was seen as a sort of a playground for the American middle-class? Indeed, American media depictions of Cuba often involve the following:

• Old Chevrolet cars which have somehow managed to last more than the Revolution. If you type “Cuba” on Google and go to the image section, about seventy five percent of the first forty images are of cars.

• Forbidden Cuban cigars which can only be mentioned in hushed tones. Remember Tony Montana from Scarface? Google him, too, and you’ll see that the first pictures that show up are of him either smoking or holding a cigar.

• Buildings in a perpetual state of decay, as if signaling how the condition of the island has worsened after the Revolution.

• And last but not least: the melodies of a music from a land which has remained, in many ways and for a lot of people, lost in time. I am thinking here of the tour de force that was the release of the Buena Vista Social Club album in the United States and the world, and the criticism that it received from young Cuban musicians, who felt left out and declared that the album had very little to do with the music that they were currently producing.

I have been thinking about these things for a long time, and the way in which these images get fomented in a manner that has more to do with fantasy than reality. (This is not to say that in Cuba there are not old cars, or decaying buildings, or that people do not smoke cigars or listen to music from older times. That, however, is not all that Cuba is.)

Then I read Arjun Appadurai’s concept of mediascapes in his seminal work, Modernity at Large (1996), and a lot of things became clearer to me.
Appadurai defines mediascapes as “the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspaper, magazines, television stations, and film-production studios)…[and] the images of the world created by these media.” Appaduarai argues that these mediascapes provide “large and complex repertoires of images [and] narratives…to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of news and politics are profoundly mixed.”

These nostalgia-driven images of Cuba suddenly made a bit more sense, especially after considering who was producing these images, for which audiences, and how closely-related to international politics these representations of Cuba were. Indeed, these images which, as Appadurai states, “help to constitute narratives of the Other”—in this case, of Cubans—serve as a form of constructing an imagined world that downplays, if not outright erases, the blow that the Cuban Revolution of 1959 represented to American interests in Latin America. For the Cuban Revolution showed that Latin America could indeed stand up to the United States and its hypocritical “Good Neighbor” policy, which it had violated time and again through the funding of military coups, its assistance in the creation of guerrilla wars that would destabilize democratic governments, and the support of dictatorships that benefited American interests, as was the case of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. (That the Cuban Revolution took a turn for the worst, as shown by the disenchantment expressed by many Latin American thinkers who had at first supported it, well, that’s a different story which falls outside of the scope of this short reflection.)

By maintaining and disseminating images of Cuba that allude to a pre-revolutionary period, by fomenting the idea of a country whose people are still stuck in the past and have not been able to move beyond what the United States left them with (e.g. cars) and now suffer the consequences of their actions (e.g. decaying old buildings), all the while dissuading the general public, through sanctions on travel to Cuba, from personally experiencing the transformations that have occurred in the island for more than half a century—through all this, Cuba has remained the fantasy land of exotic beaches and dancers, of the mojito and the daiquiri; in other words, it has remained the land of commodities that is was up to 1959 in the eyes of the American public. In 2014, just as it was in 1959, Cuba is anything but.

But Hollywood does not seem to think so, and neither does Google Images.

Appadurai’s concept of mediascapes, therefore, provided me with a starting point for thinking about how to navigate the political and cultural intricacies of these representations, of this “Othering” that does not exclusively pertain to the case of Cuba, for a similar argument could be made for the images that the American public is currently receiving from other countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Por que te me disso isso?: Uneven access to border-crossings

Unable to view Y tu mamá también on campus, I opted for the Youtube version with Portuguese subtitles and transnational subtleties. Nevertheless, I had to rely heavily on my four years of high school Spanish. Since the visual dialogue of the film explained so much, it was surprisingly easy to follow the spoken dialogue. Perhaps this accessibility is the reason why the film appeared in thirty-nine countries. Besides casting a wide net to a global audience through Youtube, the film has many other qualities of transnational cinema.

Set in Mexico in 1999 on the cusp of the presidential elections, Y tu mamá también highlights many particularities of Mexican politics, economics and society. Simultaneously the film addressed themes that were prevalent throughout the world. The film showed how Mexico’s dominant ruling party was voted out after 71 years. One-party control was common throughout the latter 20^th century world, particularly throughout Latin America.  With the election of Vincente Fox, Mexico entered a new phase of economic liberalization and political realignment known as NAFTA.  In all of this the film is both a national and transnational product, “transcend[ing] the national as autonomous cultural particularity while respecting it as a powerful symbolic force” (page 2).

The backdrop of the film is marked by disparities between rich and poor; urban and rural; politically well-heeled and disenfranchised. Economically speaking, 1999 represents the final victory of capitalism over communism and the ascendency of neoliberalism as instituted globally through the Washington Consensus.  The film depicts a Mexican political economy that was/is occurring throughout the world. The owners of Mexican fabricadores grow filthy-rich, due to low-paid workers who manufacture cheap goods for a global market. As such its particularities make the film both a national film to which Mexicans can relate, as well as a transnational film with its universalizing themes of the growing wedge between those who benefit from neoliberal reforms and those who do not.

As the protagonists drive deeper into rural Mexico, the mens’ national identities are blurred by the rural landscape harsh lives of their Mexican brethren. The camera perspective changes between the perspectives of safe, mobile passengers to the heavily regulated and immobile rural denizens, making clear the “imaginanary nature of any notion of cultural purity” (4). The passengers – under the protective, political aura of Tenoch – drive unperturbedly past armed soldiers in the truck bed, and barely glance at the soldiers force locals into an execution-style line. Indeed the three passengers seem to be moving in a different, more privileged direction than the Mexican citizens they leave behind, calling into question Mexican solidarity.  “This leave-taking often entails, to use Freud’s term, a becoming-unheimlich both to oneself and to those who are variously invested in the diasporic subject’s remaining recognizable” (11). The three passengers seem to possess the requisite pedigrees or associations to move seamlessly through Mexican terrain, while the disenfranchised rural citizens are treated like Zapatista terrorists, whose border crossings pose danger to Mexico’s society.

Like the three cosmopolitan, upwardly-mobile passengers, who are “most ‘at home’ in the in-between spaces of culture…between the local and the global”, UMD’s campus body is neither a culturally pure of entirely separate body politic (4). A simple search for “UMD campus advisory” delivers twenty unread advisory messages alerting UMD students of off-campus burglaries, armed robberies, and most recently an off-campus incident where a female UMD student was attacked from behind by a man holding a knife. The brave young woman broke free and managed to escape from the man described as wearing a red flannel shirt and having “dirty fingernails and a foul odor” (http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/27410206/police-releases-description-of-suspect-in-umd-off-campus-attempted-kidnapping) . As important as it is to alert students of dangers in surrounding areas, the frequent advisory messages suggest that no where but campus is safe for UMD students and that all community members are dangerous and suspicious. Like community relations, transnational “cinema is borderless to varying degrees, subject to the same uneven mobility as people [who cross them]” (5).

It appears that town-gown relations have a long way to go.

Film, as a medium, has reached near universal status as a part of contemporary life.  Throughout the world, unbounded by culture, language or geography, cinema has become a large part of life.  And, increasingly, film is no longer restricted in terms of access or scope by national boundaries.  The most obvious example of this is the Hollywood blockbuster, which is expected to be distributed to a global audience, and made to fit this task.  Indeed, the value of transnational appeal of these films is becoming increasingly more apparent.  In the past few years, major Hollywood films are being distributed first internationally, often in China and other parts of Asia, before being released in the United States, and are making far more money abroad than domestically.  But it is not just the blockbuster that follows transnational patterns.  Even in the United States, which typically gives less regard to international media, foreign films and films made in collaboration with foreign participants are gaining more visibility.  Hollywood action films take inspiration from Hong Kong martial arts cinema, and foreign directors like Guillermo del Toro are picked to direct movies with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and earn back several hundred million more.  Transnational movement of film is making it harder to define a purely national style of cinema, and with the lower cost of the technology required to create films combined with the increasing ease of distribution, it is likely this trend will continue.  In their introduction to Transnational Cinema, Ezra and Rowden note that “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 (2).”  This hybridization, as they term it, does not, I believe, lead to a bland and homogenous global cinema.  The hybridizing tendencies should serve instead to further promote transnational collaboration and shared ideas and techniques to allow filmmakers to better realize their vision.

As Higson highlights in his examination of transnational cinema, “The cinemas established in specific nation-states are rarely autonomous cultural industries and the film business has long operated on a regional, national and transnational basis (19).”  The influences that affect filmmakers have not been restrained to their local contexts, nor have their works been similarly restrained.  To appreciate the collaborative, transnational processes that affect filmmakers, I think it is fruitful to consider African cinema.  There are two films in particular I would like to reference, Quartier Mozart and Karmen Gei.

Quartier Mozart by Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo, released in the early 90s, shows a clear influence from Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing.  As with Lee’s film, Quartier Mozart explores the socio-economic dynamics amongst a group of exaggerated, stereotypical characters in a limited, local context.  The majority of characters in Lee’s film are known only by nicknames, such as “Buggin’ Out” and “Radio Raheem.”  Similarly, Quartier Mozart largely features characters with names such as “Chien Mechant (Mad Dog)” and “Montype (My Guy).”  However, the influences of Lee’s film are mixed into a plot that is specific to the Cameroonian context.  The central story of the film follows the story of a young girl who, wishing to experience life as a man, is transformed by a witch into the young man Montype.  Mixing the aesthetic of Lee’s Do the Right Thing with supernatural elements that are unique to the African context, it shows how filmmakers are using the transnational nature of cinema to expand the ways in which they can present their stories.

Karmen Gei also shows the influence of transnational works in the creation of national cinema.  The film, released in 2001 by Senegalese director Joseph Gaï Ramaka, reimagines the story of Georges Bizet’s 19^th century opera Carmen, which was itself inspired by a novella by Prosper Mérimée.  The film recasts the characters of the opera into a contemporary Senegalese setting, taking place in the capital of Dakar.  The musical aspect of Bizet’s work is retained, as the film is a musical, but the music has been translated to match the local context.  The titular character Karmen repeatedly sings lines from Carmen’s famous Habanera, but the lyrics are in Wolof, and the rhythm and accompaniment are taken from popular Senegalese music.  The transnational nature of the film is further highlighted by the large scope of the film, clearly inspired by Hollywood musicals.  This process of appropriating themes, aesthetics and material from abroad serves to enhance the final product.  I believe these two films exemplify what Higson states about the impact of foreign films on indigenous cultures: “…the introduction of exotic elements may well have a liberating or democratizing effect on the local culture, expanding the cultural repertoire (19).”

I would like to end with a short personal anecdote.  During the past year, between finishing my graduate program at Virginia Tech and beginning my studies in Maryland, I worked in a daycare.  During this time the Disney film Frozen was released, and became incredibly popular with the young children I worked with.  Shortly after the film was released, Disney uploaded to Youtube a video, currently with more than 41 million views, of the song “Let It Go” sung in many different languages.  I remember the kids at the daycare being very excited as they found this video, trying their best to imitate the languages and asking me to teach them the rest of the lyrics in French.  I think there’s something inherently appealing and humanizing in the realization that, throughout the world, people are captivated by the same films.

In effect, it is common currency to admit that cinema and American cinema are synonymous, although there is always a place reserved for “otherness”: national cinemas, Bollywood, women´s cinema and so on. It is necessary to bear in mind that cinema is an art and also a business, and the control of the distribution by multinational film companies is often more important than the story itself. I have noticed that US productions are very different from Spanish, European or Latin American movies because of the capitalist system of production. In terms of form, US movies generally include handsome protagonists, happy endings and, since there is always a problematic situation that the main character has to solve, s a cause-effect relationship between events.  On the contrary, European and Latin American cinema embrace other characteristics: their protagonists are normal people, there are opened endings and nobody knows the incentive of the characters, thus there is no obvious cause-effect relationship.

In terms of content, US productions will adapt a novel if there is a really good version of it, a well studied plot in which everything is solved at the end, and all the characters fix their life problems. Regarding the representation of sexuality, American cinema inserts music, the scenes are usually at night and bodies are covered most of the time. All of these aspects function as a precursor of the sexual scene, however, in European and Latin American cinema, the sex is more explicit and you can see both characters naked. Additionaly, this cinema shows the sex scenes without preambles because these scenes are not usually just for pleasure, but exist as a political subject. In this way, sex is a metaphor of politics, which is why all the sex scenes in “Y a tu mamá también” hide a political issue described by the extra-diegetic voice-over. This narrator tells the “other” story, the Mexican one, which shows us the problems and concerns of the history of Mexico, like the strike in which Julio’s sister participates with other people representing the Zapatistas because of the signing of NAFTA in 1994. This situation is even more allegoric because Julio and his sister’s last name is Zapata. It overlaps with the story of Tenoch-a short name of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the expanding Mexican Empire in the 15^th century-Julio and Luisa Cortés, the Spanish girl–whose last name coincides with the conquer Hernán Cortés–and their trip to Boca del Cielo. The three protagonists continue their journey: meanwhile the Mexican national-historical memory emerge in a few seconds to make it visible to the audience and as a means of vindication. These seconds are enough to remind the audience of what politicians did in the past, like the police pressure on peasants or the reminder through painted signs of which states respect civil rights.

Cuarón proposes a cultural and historical model mixed with the story of the three protagonists who are, by the way, a continuum or extension of the main story, the historical one. The result of the scenes depicting sex and drugs is a sort of vindication of youth against what happened in the past. This style of life of Julio and Tenoch reminded me of the celebrated passage by Carlos Fuentes in The Death of Artemio Cruz in which the word “chingada” is repeated again and again throughout an entire page to express a summary of Mexican history. “Chingada” is a symbol and countersign of Mexico, as Fuentes states. This word also expresses–paraphrasing Fuentes’ passage– a project of life, a memory, the voice of the desperate people, the sign of the birthday, the freedom of poor people, command of powerful governors, threats and mockery, parties and drunkenness, race…and all Mexicans are part of this word that implies all of these connotations. However, the first meaning of “chingada” is the mythical mother. A majority of indigenous women were raped by Spaniards in the process of colonization and it is said that Mexicans are sons of “la chingada.”, which implies conflicts in their identity. Maybe that is why the movie has this allegorical title Y tu mamá también, referring to the idea that even your mother is the daughter of “la chingada.” In fact, Julio says the title phrase at the very end of the movie when they are drinking and smoking at the bar, after which is a key sexual scene in which both male protagonists sleep with one other. It seems like there is an unclear sexual identity between them. This unclear sexual identity can refer to — or serve as a metaphor of– the rapes of the colonial period and the consequences that it had in Mexican identity and its conflicts. Cuarón wants to express to the world several conflicts through his movie: on the one hand, he criticizes Mexican society because they were action less in important moments in the past (which is reflected in Tenoch and Julio´s lifestyle, caring about nothing other than sex and drugs). Thus, he critiques the submissive Mexican society. At the same time, Cuarón gives voice to all of the injustices committed against them and reclaims their rights in a visual way, through the strike scene for instance, and in a narrative way, because of the voice-over which provides information about Mexican history.  One the other hand, Cuarón is also telling the story of Mexican roots and what this conflict means in contemporary Mexican society. This idea is expressed through sex and drug use of the protagonists as the way of enduring the identity conflict. Therefore, there are not two different stories but complementary ones, as the “total novels” of Latin American boom. The movie, therefore, embraces all the conflicts in Mexico in detail and use characters and a narrator who represent these specific conflicts and helps to understand the hidden meanings embedded in a movie with different independent stories. It also expresses what Mexico means by the movie as a totality. Then, it could be considered as a “Total movie”.

By analysis of the movie as “total”, Cuarón expresses his particular method of transnational cinema by introducing Transatlantic and specific names as well as what the character represents in a metaphorical way, such as Luisa Cortés. Furthermore, he makes a movie which shows to the world that the past problems and concerns of Mexico regarding politic, rights, oppression, and submission still occur today. Cinema is a narrative, an efficient and affective machine of telling (transnational) stories and History, going beyond linguistic frontiers.

After watching the movie and doing the readings for this week, I looked for the trailer of the movie. I wondered how the trailer could show the complexity of this movie in just a couple of minutes. It is very interesting that the trailer has no dialogues, just a sequence of scenes, accompanied by music. The first scene has solemn music; from the second scene until the end,  parts of three songs are played: a Molotov song called “Here comes the mayo” (Molotov is a Mexican rap-rock band very famous up to the present time); an Eagle-eye song: “To love somebody” (This singer is an Sweden- Northamerican singer who took this song from a British-Australian band called the Bee Gees, a very popular band in the sixties); and the third song appeared until the penultimate scene in the trailer that is called: “La Sirenita” by Rigo Tovar (Rigo Tovar is a Mexican singer who creates a musical mix using different kinds of regional music with rock). It shows a mix of international music combined with national music, which also represents national culture and folklore. The last scene finishes with the sound of the sea. Furthermore, a black screen with white letters sometimes appears between the changing of scenes which says: “LIFE has a way of teaching us,” “LIFE has a way of confusing us,” “LIFE has a way of changing us,” “LIFE has a way of surprising us,” “LIFE has a way of hurting us,” “LIFE has a way of healing us,” and “LIFE has a way of inspiring us.”

Paying attention to the scenes selected for the trailer, we can observe that it shows images of some social aspects of Mexico (the traffic jam produced by the death of an immigrant, a scene of a “quinceañera”, the police on one side of the road doing an inspection of settlersm an old woman street vendor of handcrafts, and random people from Mexico villages) as well as landscapes of the country. Principal scenes focus on the friendship of the two main characters: Tenoch and Julio and on some others, like Luisa. It is also interesting that the trailer finishes with an image of Luisa at the sea. The fact that there is no dialogue requires more visual attention and a wider interpretation for the audience. The constant leitmotiv of “LIFE has a way of…” give us an idea that the film could be about learning and experiences of life in general. Taking up the musical aspect again, it also contributes to the idea of life: starting with a solemn music makes me think of a beginning of something like a birth; then, it comes up rap and rock music that make me think of independency, youth and revelry. After that, the love song makes me think of experiences and the necessity of discovering new things about “the other.” In the next sequence there is a mix of national and rock music that makes me think of a lifetime in which we suffer and we mature. This part is accompanied by the crying of Luisa and then it finishes everything with the scene at the sea. Water could be interpreted as a symbol of creation and destruction, birth (as it starts in the swimming pool) and death (at the sea and also because Luisa is also the character who dies in the movie and it appears in this scene of the sea), which makes “life” into something circular as nature. Moreover, the sea is a sign of freedom, a space without borders and it is also one of the aspects that the movie show us with the kind of “life” the two main characters have.

This movie clearly shows a double face and two perspectives in one: the international and the national. According to the film critics, Hollywood cinema is taken as the model of “international and global” movies. They are movies based on cause and effect and the searching for adventure. In contrast, national cinema is more focused on art and culture, as a way of rethinking national society and culture. If we think about the plot of Y tu mamá también there is no more than a trip to a Mexican beach but at the same time it shows us some stereotypical images of settlers living in nearby villages which also represent national culture. At the same time, images of Mexico streets, a traffic accident, and a protest in the center of the city also represent social and national problems. Is it, therefore, a national or a global movie? Based on the plot itself it could be consider as an international movie: two young guys in their age of sexual discovery who enjoy life having sex and taking drugs and who spend several days with an adult woman from Spain who teach them new experiences about sex. At the end, this trip and the relationship that both have with this woman ends up becoming a life lesson and a dilemma for them: love vs. hate, betrayal vs. friendship, heterosexual desire vs. homosexual desire.

However, the extra diegetic voice-over is very important for the representation of the nation. It acts as a narrator in a novel, giving us hidden details which helps to construct the socio-economical context of the plot and contributes to the creation of the national vision: what the protest is about, what happened in some places some years ago or the background and social status of the main characters. These two guys do not represent all the social problems that Mexican society has, but they are an specific part of it: the Mexican upper class. And sex and drugs are political metaphors. These two guys are living in a constant state of “carpe diem” which provokes an escape from reality. There are no boundaries and economical restrictions for them and they are unconscious of the life from outside the bubble that they live in. They live a parallel life to what is actually occurring in Mexico society politically and economically. Tenoch lives in a mansion and his father is involved in the economic corruption of the country, which is paradoxically a problem of the country.

This movie is an adventure that explores the light and the darkness of each of the characters but it also shows that the society they live in is just a game of appearances. In addition, the break of this relationship and the silence at the end are crucial. They leave a feeling of melancholia and emptiness. Mexico is represented as a place of social difference, economic corruption and taboos, and where the claims of middle class society are hidden and ignored. This movie goes from the international interpretations attending to plot, to the national interpretation attending to details.

While reading this week’s texts and attempting to formulate my own understanding of transnational cinema, I found myself returning to the discussions we had at the beginning of the semester, specifically the hyphenated terminology. Even though “transnationalism” isn’t technically hyphenated, I feel that one can imagine of what the hyphenated space would be comprised. Thinking back to the first brainstorming session and the subsequent classes where we tried to define “transnationalism” as a concept, we questioned the hyphenated terms in relation to Appadurai and Bhabha’s texts. With Appadurai, we concluded that the “— scapes” showed how these different “landscapes” were changing, whereas Bhabha related to “the beyond,” or more appropriately, “the in-between,” which highlighted the unification or point of department of two seemingly distinct entities. Given this week’s readings and film, I would like to speculate on the hyphen that creates trans-national cinema. Is it comprised of thematic content which distinguishes national films from the transnational or rather the “behind the scenes” material which guides the filming process?

This semester, the Spanish Film Club has presented its 3^rd annual film festival sponsored by Pragda showcasing highly acclaimed or up-and-coming talents from Spain and Latin America. Apart from the documentary, ¿Qué culpa tiene el tomate?, which is a cross-cultural comparison of the respective countries’ produce markets, the other films portray a nationally or culturally specific narrative. Therefore, I can’t help but wonder how one defines transnational cinema. Is it transnational if the cinematic content crosses borders, as in the aforementioned documentary? Or, does an ethnically/culturally/linguistically diverse cast and crew lend itself to a transnational category? Finally, how does the viewer impact transnational cinema? I find myself questioning how festivals promoting independent films, or those being produced on a smaller budget, have impacted national or international reception; therefore, I think the audience plays just as much a role in establishing a transnational cinema due to the ability to access films at the click of a button, whether on our tablets, smartphones, or laptops. Within our own academic setting, we can show films via Netflix or YouTube to our students, which is a vital component in opening the classroom to authentic texts; or rather, we expand the borders of our classrooms as we travel alongside Julio and Tenoch in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también or becoming four Mexican teenagers’ accomplice in robbing a movie theater, as in Iria Gómez Concheiro’s Asalto al cine.

As the prompt suggests, cinema is a collaborative effort not only in terms of the aesthetic and artistic qualities but also in terms of financing and producing capital. Even though the majority of their text is focused on Mexico, Baer and Long point out that “the international co-productions in the 1990s and 2000s are emblematic products of globalization: financed by global capital, featuring international casts, shot in several countries and often several languages, and foregrounding the hybrid status of their production contexts in both their formal construction and narrative content” (150). Following this line of thought, it would seem that transnational cinema is equally impacted by the interaction of on- and off-screen international influences. In their critical text, Ezra and Rowden suggest that “cinema has from its inception been transnational, circulating more or less freely across borders and utilizing international personnel” (2). However, keeping this in mind and returning to my original question of the hyphenated space, they argue that “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” (4). They acknowledge that the in-between is what constitutes the transnational.

This “in-between” is often materialized, as they discuss, when films are no longer shot on-location, which complicates the transnational classification. For example, in Peter Berg’s 2013 Lone Survivor “Marcus Luttrell and his team set out on a mission to capture or kill notorious Taliban leader Ahmad Shah, in late June 2005. Marcus and his team are left to fight for their lives in one of the most valiant efforts of modern warfare” (IMDB) in Afghanistan. However, it was shot entirely in New Mexico; therefore, is Lone Survivor a transnational film? To what extent does the filming location occupy the hyphenated space?

Another complication emerges when literary texts are translated into feature films. For example, in Love the Hard Way (2001), director Peter Sehr moves the narrative to New York City, where the movie is filmed in its entirety, even though it is based on Chinese author Wang Shuo’s novel Yi Ban Shi Huo Yan, Yi Ban Shi Hai Shui. In this case, one should question the artistic licensing available to re-write or re-interpret a text to such a degree that the setting is relocated. Additionally, Love the Hard Way is classified as an “Eastern European – Foreign Film” on Netflix, even though it is filmed in English in New York based on a Chinese novel.

While trying to address how transnational cinema should be analyzed, I am unable to identify a single, definitive response. As Andrew Higson notes, in regards to transnational cinema, “The experience of border crossing takes place at two broad levels. First there is the level of production and the activities of the film-makers. […] The second way [is] in terms of the distribution and reception of films” (19). Ultimately, I think the imagined hyphenation or “in-between” in the trans-national consists of spontaneous and organic interactions between the following components: the specificity of the production team, including the actors, directors, crew, etc., the financial backing, the filming location, the thematic/cinematic content, viewing location (theater, festival, university classroom, or internet), use of subtitles and reliability of translations, among others.

At one point or another, I am sure all of us have overheard someone say “I’d rather wait for the movie to come out”. According to Ezra and Rowden, “film is rapidly displacing literature (in particular the novel) as the textual emblematization of cosmopolitan knowing and identity (3). While as a medium it is quite distinguishable from traditional literature, one cannot deny that its transnational appeal may have an even greater outreach than that of a text. Cinema as a medium has become a more prevalent form of exposure to the concept of transnationalism, especially for the younger generations that do not remember a time without television or the internet. Furthermore, as a visual portrayal, the potency of transnational outreach is intensified by expanding accessibility. This semester, we have had a few discussions about transnationalism and privilege in terms of who has access to information and who does not.  In regards to reception, film can thus serve as a means to ameliorate this criticism of privilege based on access which is often encountered in literature, as it mostly does not require literacy or a complex comprehension of lengthy texts.

However, the advantages that film may hold over traditional texts in both transnational production and reception also come with a new set questions and implications. Ezra and Rowden quote Jigna Desai and make a great point about reception by saying that “those films most likely to circulate transnationally are those that are more ‘Western friendly’, adopting familiar genres, narratives, or themes” and thus function “as ‘tasty, easily swallowed, apolitical global cultural morsels’ (6). In terms of production, it is also important to consider Ezra and Rowden’s point that “more heavily financed films tend to cross national borders with greater ease (5). So while film as a medium may increase exposure to a greater audience on a transnational level, these proposed considerations may hamper transnational depictions within the production process itself.

In order to illustrate this point, I would like to use a recent film series in order to demonstrate how both production and reception can be influenced by ongoing transnational discourses, both within and outside of the nation. An example that immediately comes to mind is the Harry Potter series, which gained even greater notoriety after being transcribed into to the world of cinema. For the purposes of this post, I will assume that most have heard of, or are quite familiar with, the Harry Potter franchise. I would like to draw specific attention to a character named Lavender Brown, a fellow Gryffindor in Harry’s year. She plays a minor role in the books, and makes even rarer appearances in the first five Harry Potter films. The ethnicity of her character is never truly specified in the books, and is left largely open to interpretation. However, in her few appearances in the first five films, she is played by an African American (or Afro British) girl, as can be seen below:

This, in itself, did not become controversial until the cinematic version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (book 6) came out, where viewers suddenly found a completely different actress cast as the character of Lavender. If you take a look at the picture below, it becomes obvious why this casting decision raised numerous concerns:

It becomes apparent that a decision was made to replace Lavender’s previous character with a Caucasian actress. Her role in the series becomes most prominent in this film, as she has a brief relationship with one of the main characters (Ron). It appears that now that she becomes (even briefly) the romantic interest of Ron, the producers of the series assumed an interracial relationship would not be what Ezra and Rowden describe as ‘Western friendly’ or a ‘tasty […] easily swallowed morsel’. They are essentially maintaining their “homogenizing imperative” in order to “neutralize transnational cinema’s more fundamentally destabilizing potential” (Ezra and Rowden 11). Afraid of losing profit due to potentially deconstructing the preconceived notions and imagination of a transnational audience, homogenizing the discourse and relationships within the film seemed of greater importance. In this way, the decision defines the film as one that “narrates the nation as just this finite, limited space, inhabited by a tightly coherent and unified community, closed off to other identities besides national identity” (Higson 18).

This decision is even more so striking, when remembering that Ron and Harry took the Patil twins (two girls of Indian descent) to a grand Ball in the fourth installment of the movie series titled Goblet of Fire. It seems that to the producers, the portrayal of the latter interracial relationships is fine, especially since the twins were essentially what would be considered ‘last resort’ dates for both Harry and Ron. We see an exemplification of the process Higson attributes to certain branches of cinema dealing with ‘foreign commodities’, in that “it will not be treated as exotic, but […] will be metaphorically translated into a local idiom” (19). The ‘foreign commodity’ as a love interest is homogenized to conform to a universal and apolitical imagination in order to prevent loss of profit, while it is seen as perfectly acceptable when the ‘foreign’ or ‘exotic’ illustrated as an object of last resort. So while the possible advantages of transnational cinema over traditional literature in contemporary culture are indisputable, taking a closer look at certain examples can also unearth problematic implications for both the production and reception of transnational discourses within the world of cinema.

I find myself really taken by the ethical and epistemological stakes in considering Hegemann’s literary technique (the technique itself, and her use of it) in the context of global media production, circulation, and consumption. The technique in question involves using material without acknowledging their source, what whistle blowers call plagiarism, but Hegemann defends as “mixing,” according to Nicholas Kulish’s New York Times article. We may ask which it “really” is, or whether the technique itself challenges prevailing notions of knowledge/cultural production, or whether Hegemann’s use of the technique in this case was ethical. Rather than taking and defending a position in the debate (of which there are many sides), I think it’s more interesting to think about different aspects of some of the broader questions such a debate raises.

Hegemann is right, I believe, in claiming that there’s no such thing as originality anyway, and that knowledge production always involves a sort of taking and remixing. I think this is a pretty solid epistemological stance, one which challenges proprietary notions of knowledge and culture, notions grounded in Western philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment that presuppose/require a rational subject, and which are universalizing in nature. This stance also threatens canonicity in art, literature, and other institutionalized domains of cultural production, thus challenging imperial cultural hierarchies of race, nation, gender, class, and ability. Challenging these prevailing notions of knowledge and culture as proprietary and therefore profitable entails a critique of rights predicated on ownership, the model according to which most modern nation-states are articulated; transnationalism enables such a critical position, and transnational approaches to knowledge and cultural production can shine a light on other ways the nation-state is involved. In describing this epistemological stance, I suppose I’m thinking in terms of the post-positivist stance taken by poststructuralist, postcolonial and transnational feminist academics including those thinking in terms of new materialisms, but I also wonder to what extent Hegemann’s defense of her literary technique represents an epistemological stance characteristic of more and more widely held (ie not purely academic) attitudes towards cultural production in the current phase of globalization. In either case, it’s important to clarify that the stance is not the technique. In other words, the technique itself may or may not do these things that its justification does—it depends on context—but the technique and its use are perhaps part of a wider shift in consciousness regarding cultural/knowledge production that attends the current phase in the global circulation of media and information technologies.

I’m more of mixed minds when it comes to the claim that this technique represents a generational shift in thinking about knowledge and culture, as Hegemann’s defense of her technique makes. There are perhaps bits of truth in such a claim, but it’s a bit too totalizing and needs to be thought through in terms of specific and deeply contextualized histories of the developments in new media and information technologies and the global circulation of culture and ideas, as well as the specific techniques, practices, and aesthetics that have developed across a range of modes of cultural production. In other words, we must be careful not to let a specific technique, like sampling and remixing, stand in metonymically for all kinds of similar techniques used in different contexts under globalization, lest we risk losing historical specificity. This is, perhaps, where a transnational analytical approach would be most critical.

And finally, whether or not the technique itself is epistemologically legitimate, or indicative of historical shifts in processes of cultural production and knowledge production (and common sense understandings of/attitudes towards these) in the current era of globalization, was Hegemann’s use of the technique ethical, given the technique’s (implication in) various histories? Answering this question requires taking the long historical view of globalization as driven by the processes of colonization and its aftermath advocated by Paul Jay, while keeping in mind warnings of the inadequacy of theories of “Western” cultural imperialism in explaining globalization, as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan and others remind us. I make this point in order to be cognizant of the central role that stealing ideas played in various histories of imperialism and colonization—the theft of local knowledges has been central in oppressing indigenous and local mixings of culture via colonization, by which colonizing powers extract local knowledges like a raw material resource and appropriate them in order to exploit colonized peoples, processes which lead to the extermination of entire groups of people and local histories. So the stealing of ideas is not without its history in the history of globalization, but we must also be careful not to let this understanding become reductionist. Acknowledging this tension as part of the context in discussions of “mixing” as a literary technique in the current phase of globalization invites a mode of study similar to what Grewal and Kaplan advocate: one that “adopts a more complicated model of transnational relations in which power structures, asymmetries, and inequalities become the conditions of possibility of new subjects” (671). This view of transnational relations, one that takes the material histories of various kinds of transnational encounters as central to understanding the practices that flow through and out of them, enables a more rigorous and ethical approach to answering the questions such as those raised by Hegemann’s “mixing.”

The opening abstract of Volker Woltersdorff’s article “Paradoxes of Precarious Sexualities” summarizes his considerations of neo-sexualities, a concept developed by Volkmar Sigusch, as relating in part to “the provision of care giving, sustainability of commitments, and loss of autonomy” (164). An approach to Helene Hegemann’s novel Axolotl Roadkill with these three domains in mind yields many opportunities to question concepts of sexuality and gender identity. Moreover, the novel provides ample evidence of the precarity claimed by Woltersdorff, and which is a prerequisite for “queer movements that contest both heteronormativity and neo-liberalism” (165).

Woltersdorff begins his exploration of precarity with Judith Butler’s ideas of instances of instability as sources of pleasure (qtd. in Woltersdorff: 167). He suggests that stability, too, can provide both pleasure and discomfort necessary for eroticism to emerge, and goes on to question exactly where stability and instability might clash. In Hegemann’s novel, it is the protagonist, Mifti, who embodies this interplay. Her reliability as a narrator is at best suspect and at worst non-existent. Clouded by copious drug use, hallucinations, and blackouts bordering on fugue states, her recounting of events produces a jarring experience for the reader. However, between her ramblings and non sequiturs, Mifti manages at times to relate a coherent story. As such, the reader, along with Mifti’s conversation partners are left to question concepts of authority and authenticity.

Sexuality and gender identity are also called into question throughout the novel. In fact, for the first several pages, it is unclear whether the narrator is male or female. An exchange with a “heterosexual female communication designer in blue and grey striped cardigan” (5) clearly identifies one interlocutor, but not the other. A certain maleness is suggested by the fact that Mifti needs help with shopping and food preparation, stereotypically women’s duties, as further evidenced by the communication designer’s assumption that the mother initiated the errand.

The later revelation that Mifti is biologically female does little to straighten out, so to speak, the issue of sexuality. One of Mifti’s first explicitly mentioned sexual encounters involves her friend Ophelia. The two are watching television and discussing scenes they find arousing and end up kissing. As Ophelia describes the situation, “[w]e’re both so gender-confused, honey” (38). Smoothio, a fling of Mifti’s bisexual (gay?) brother questions her orientation directly. Her reply—“I hardly jumped for joy when I found out about it, but yeah, I’m as bi as they come as well”—is not exactly a declaration of pride or conscious branding (130).

Mifti describes sexual relations with several men, too, but always with a sense of detachment or disengagement on her part. With the taxi driver, Pörskin, and the psychoanalyst, she seems to come to midway through the act itself, as if unsure how it began. I believe that Woltersdorff’s ideas of sustainability of commitments and loss of autonomy are important here. Mifti describes early on the conflict she faces in fighting or giving in to her desires. “Doing what I want is dangerous because it really makes me vulnerable. Not doing it is not an option” (15). Here we see the stability versus instability, with the latter seeming to win out. She later states that “[s]ex is always an act of violence anyway” (52), though none of the trysts seem to fall into the category of rape. Indeed, on two occasions she claims rape (172) or offers to (113) as a means of diminishing personal accountability for her own actions. In some way, though, she does seem not to be in control of her own actions, and while drugs are a likely cause, the loss of autonomy is undeniable.

With the psychoanalyst—and eventually Ophelia—sustainability of commitments is the issue. Mifti has trouble maintaining the status of her relationships with these two people. The psychoanalyst states quite clearly that he is not interested in sex (169), and genuinely seems to want to care for an incapacitated and weakened Mifti, but not ten pages later, the relationship takes a carnal turn. With Ophelia, it is an established friendship that withers in the end. Here, the difference in age and functionality again hint at a caregiver relationship somehow complicated by unclear boundaries. A similar disconnect between care giver and charge occurs within Mifti’s immediate family, too. An abusive, mentally ill mother; an affluent but absent father; and older siblings who practice the same drug-filled lifestyle leave her with no adult figures to whom she might turn for guidance. In the end, Mifti seeks to fill that gap in the figure of Alice, a woman who also represents Mifti’s greatest lost love.

The precarity of sexuality and gender identity is illustrated in Axolotl Roadkill in the model of instability argued by Volker Woltersdorff. In Mifti, the reader encounters a teenage girl facing insecurities brought about by drug use and dysfunctional relationships with family and friends. In the wake if these insecurities, Mifti is left to chart her own course and define her own identities as daughter, sister, and lover.