The transnational film unit in our course prompted me to think about the ways in which foreign film industries, products, and consumers are not only multinational, but also transnational. As a student of literary and cultural studies, I feel that our course readings, especially the introduction to Transnational Cinema, The Film Reader by by Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, have allowed me to rethink how the Western culture industry (i.e. Hollywood) might be a globalizing industry, but also a glocalizing one. I would argue that, while the American culture industry has expanded its reach around the globe, the glocalizing efforts of Nollywood film producers are challenging the assumed role of cultural production as a primarily profit-driven industry to placate and market to consumers.

In “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1944), Marxist critics Adorno and Horkheimer criticize film and radio productions (among other industries) for their creation of artless, homogenous, and deceptive cultural products, referencing specific examples of popular film, television, and music in their analysis. They claim that “the whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry” (56), but our class discussions on transnationalism have prompted me to ask how the culture industry is filtered in other parts of the world in the current era of globalization.

Near the beginning of their introduction, Ezra and Rowden explain how the Hollywood entertainment industry, much like Adorno and Horkheimer claimed, “has succeeded in maintaining its hegemonic influence in large part by imagining the global audience as a world of sensation-starved children” (2). Put another way, the target audience is the democratic audience, and the Hollywood industry considers all possible approaches to a story so that no work can really be considered unique or challenging.

However, what Adorno and Horheimer perhaps did not anticipate, and what Ezra and Rowden draw attention to, is the emergence of parallel culture industries in non-Western nations. The lower cost and greater accessibility of filmmaking equipment allow individuals from around the world to create their own films without any expectations of network studios, corporate funding, or a theater release and then DVD distribution system. According to Ezra and Rowden, this new, accepted, and even celebrated standard of filmmaking “has facilitated the rise of a culture of access that functions as a delegitimizing shadow of the official film cultures of most nation-states as they have been determined by the processes of screening, censorship, rating, and critique” (6). With this idea in mind, I’d like to think about two alternative national cultural industries that, while capturing national issues in many of their films, demonstrate how the new “cine-literacy,” or storytelling through film, can lead to transnational moments.

Bollywood has become one of the largest film industries in the world; Indian producers borrow their action, comedy, romance, drama, and musical genres from the West, and many of their plotlines revolve around typical themes of love and power. Adorno might say this reveals how the tool of the “technically enforced ubiquity of stereotypes” (60) is applicable in any society. Nonetheless, what Bollywood has done differently from Hollywood is integrate uniquely Indian struggles and customs into their films. For example, the 2011 Indian film Aarakshan caused a lot of controversy because of its direct attempt to critique the caste system and other aspects of traditional Indian society. The film features several well-known Bollywood actors, and the movie posters, seen below, draw particular attention to social issues that are specific to India. The film drew mediocre box office sales, partially because of the fact that the film was banned in three states.

Movie poster for “Aarakshan”

Despite borrowing the styles and tools popularized by Hollywood cinema, Bollywood films may be distinguished from Hollywood films because of their attempts to address specific national social and cultural issues. Because of these distinctions, it was Bollywood film, rather than Hollywood film, that had a profound impact on audiences within the Hausa culture of northern Nigeria. Nigerians were not an audience that Bollywood producers had in mind when they created their films, but anthropologist Brian Larkin indicates that Indian films became popularized in Nigeria because they presented a “parallel modernity” that Hausa men and women could identify with. He claims that Indian film offered Nigerians “an alternative world, similar to their own, from which they may imagine other forms of fashion, beauty, love, romance, coloniality and postcoloniality” (351). This unique moment reveals how a national cinema had an unexpected affect when read by a completely different national and regional audience.

Although the industry is seldom acknowledged outside of Africa, Nollywood has become a highly successful cultural entity that produces 2,000 films per year. What places the Nollywood phenomenon at the greatest contrast to Adorno’s culture industry conception is the fact that Nigerian producers are not as evidently focused on the market value of their products. The film narratives mostly stem not from capitalist ideology or redundant Hollywood plot lines, but rather from newspaper rumors and local folklore (McCall 2007: 96). Further, most Nigerian films are shot in about a week with cheap digital devices, and are distributed as direct-to-CD products that are often pirated. In this sense, those who truly benefit from Nollywood are not the producers or elites, but rather the viewers from Nigeria and many other parts of Africa, who have finally found a medium that highlights local ideas rather than Western ones.

Subtitled screenshot from the low-budget Nollywood film, “Ajum Akwam Iko”

In short, what I have learned from the transnational film unit is that Western film industries are not necessarily homogenizing, infantilizing forces. Although emerging “Third Cinema,” or non-Western, film industries may parallel Hollywood film in some ways, it is evident that the film narratives and economies of production differ greatly from traditional styles and methods. While a lot of foreign films continue to reflect national and local issues, it is interesting to see how the films are consumed and appreciated by multinational audiences. I think the parallel modernities, or alternative culture industries, that are constantly developing will be worthwhile subjects for students of cultural studies to explore further.

At a large university in the United States, it may be difficult to imagine an educational and research environment prior to the popularization of Wikipedia and other online tools. Yet, what happens when the “Global South” also gains access to these tools? Can people from these countries only see themselves as consumers of content produced by the “Global North?” To what extent can people from all over the world become content creators as well as consumers?

Despite all the progress Wikipedia has made to become a free, open access, multilingual, easily comprehensible and editable resource for people around the world to use, Raval seeks to address and challenge the issue of continued Western male dominance of the site editors. Raval indicates that a 2012 study found that “nine out of ten” Wikipedia editors are male, according to the Wikimedia Foundation blog. Further, although the Wikipedia Zero initiative seeks to make content more readily available in Africa and Asia through platforms other than computers, such as cell phones and SMS services, this may only solve the issue of granting more people access to reading Wikipedia content, rather than actually editing or contributing articles.

I’d like to explore how knowledge is being consumed and produced on digital platforms in the non-Western world by specifically considering how national, large-scale hyper-modernization projects in Sub-Saharan African countries are heavily focused on the development of ICT (Information Communication Technology) initiatives that may include the dissemination of Wikipedia content on multiple platforms. In Rwanda, for example, President Kagame has developed a national initiative called “Vision 2020,” which calls for the nation to transform its economy from an agricultural base to a technological one by the year 2020. In his speech to Carnegie Mellon University in 2011, upon his announcement of the new Carnegie Mellon graduate technology program in Rwanda, he claimed that technology was the perfect industry for the Rwandan people to contribute to because, while they do not have the most abundant natural resources, their large population of young people can learn the tools and trade of technology and help to transform Rwanda into the ICT capital, or “Silicon Valley” of Africa.

Rwanda is not the only African country interested in ICT development. In fact, nations like Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, and South Africa (a.k.a. the “Silicon Cape”) are in many ways competing to be the ICT leader of Africa. In addition, they are arguably uniting to overcome past and ongoing national conflicts by rebranding themselves as countries of economic growth and technological innovators in the “Silicon Savannah.” You can read more about the respective economic achievement and competition in Kenya and Rwanda here. This blog also includes numerous articles about ICT development in Africa as a whole and Rwanda in particular, from the perspective of a Carnegie Mellon tech professor teaching at CMU-Rwanda.

Infographic of African tech innovation hubs and labs

With this development plan in mind, I’d like to revisit the question of how information such as Wikipedia articles might be disseminated in places like Rwanda. I think the Wikipedia Zero initiative is helpful because most people in Rwanda, especially outside the capital city, only have regular access to mobile phones (but not smart phones). This is why many Rwandan-based ICT developers are focusing on creating automated tools and content that people can access by listening to prompts and pressing corresponding buttons, rather than touch-screen applications that would only be accessible to a small elite.

I’m curious to know what the form of a Wikipedia article would look like on a mobile device without internet access. According to the Wikipedia Zero plan, articles could be sent to users via text message. This idea could be helpful if people wanted to quickly find out a bit of information about a particular topic, but it seems as though it would be less easy to use if one wanted to do a considerable amount of research or even browse a page for different content. Translations would be available for the content, but it’s unclear as to who would be translating the documents and how many articles could actually be translated into less commonly taught languages such as Kinyarwanda, let alone Swahili.

I also don’t see any indication in the Wikipedia Zero plan that the project will be conducive to people who may want to contribute to Wikipedia in some way. If I look at Wikipedia now, I see very little information about Rwandan arts and culture. Some artists’ names may be listed, but only three of them have at least a paragraph of information about their works. If more Rwandans are able to access Wikipedia articles, will it be common knowledge to them that they have the ability to edit this open access encyclopedia and contribute their own entries, or will they only see it as something they can read?

In short, I find it interesting and productive that projects like Wikipedia Zero are aiming to provide more people from around the world with free access to digital content, yet I remain concerned about how accessible or cumbersome this technology may be, and how more people can see themselves as producers rather than merely consumers. Perhaps these issues may be addressed in later proposals for the project. Many people in urban Rwanda might tell you that technology cannot be pre-packaged and disseminated easily from the U.S. to Africa. If ICT development projects are going to have any sustainable success in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as many other parts of the world, it is important that local innovators who understand particular societal and infrastructural concerns can develop projects that help to enable people, rather than merely aid them.

When I first saw the animated film adaptation Persepolis in theaters in 2007 (see trailer), I was thrilled to finally see a highly commercialized story depicting the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, which many of my friends and family in Iran have been coming to terms with for many years. Although the film is a faithful adaptation of the graphic novel, the text allows readers to pause and reflect upon certain images, thereby allowing them to animate these images themselves.

In Persepolis, Satrapi describes her personal history as a middle class Iranian woman who experiences the effects of a post-revolutionary transnationalism as she migrates across Iranian and European borders and attempts to explore and test the boundaries of identity expression within the boundaries of the state. The graphic novel form allows her to tell this story in a unique way because she can illustrate the figuratively and artistically black-and-white dichotomies in Iran and Europe during the 1980s, juxtapose simultaneous elements of brutal honesty and playfulness within select images, and explain a complex political history in a series of snapshots with small amounts of text.

Satrapi hooks her readers with her first chapter, “The Veil,” which introduces an image that I believe many people imagine when they think of Iran: women in veils. As a viewer, I am struck by these initial images of frowning young girls with white faces emerging from black veils. Further, on page 6, Satrapi includes the image of herself as a young girl split in half: on the left side is a girl with short hair, a long-sleeve top, and the gears and tools of progress in the background, while the right side depicts her in a black veil with what appears to be traditional or even religious imagery in the background. One would not see such visually drastic polarizations of lightness and darkness, or modernity and traditionalism, in a photograph or film of women in Iran wearing the veil. Through the graphic novel form, however, she is able to weave these images in ways that tell her story of this split in identity without relying solely on words or stand-alone images to convey her thoughts. I must note that, while I think such images are powerful and productive for her narrative, they can also be limiting, as the viewer only sees the solid black against solid white and cannot imagine more colorful, diversified images of veiled women in post-revolutionary Iran, such as this image from Iranian New Wave filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s 1987 film Where Is the Friend’s Home?

Iranian schoolchildren in “Where is the Friend’s Home?” (1987)

Satrapi effectively utilizes these black-and-white scenes to convey her transnational reality later on in the graphic novel, when she spends time in Austria. For example, in the chapter “The Soup,” there is one strip of images that shows how her caretakers, Zozo and her husband, Houshang, saw their lives change drastically after moving from Iran to Vienna. In one image, Zozo is a smiling secretary in Iran, and in the next, she is a frowning hairdresser in Vienna; in another image, Houshang is a smiling CEO in Iran, and in the next, “he was nothing” in Austria (157). Thus, in just four pictures with two- or three-line captions, Satrapi is able to capture the hardships of the transnational Iranian migrant in a way that would be formed and communicated differently if conveyed through other media, such as a text-based novel or documentary film.

Through the graphic novel form, Satrapi also has the advantage of being able to convey multiple images simultaneously, with multiple moods. For example, she includes one scene where children and their mothers shop in a sparse grocery store during a time of growing food shortages in Iran. While the mothers are in one corner of the scene, lamenting about how the increase in the number of refugees in Tehran has affected this food shortage, the children are in another part of the image, laughing about a bean joke (92). In this way, Satrapi juxtaposes a brutal reality of the effects of transnational migration on the middle as well as lower classes in the aftermath of a major conflict in Iran, while also showing the playful childhood innocence that still lingers during this difficult time.

Finally, the graphic novel form allows Satrapi to take many liberties in her portrayal of the political history of Iran. Because she can only capture her situation through images and small amounts of text, she is able to summarize key events in ways that the reader can easily digest the history. For instance, in her chapter, “The Sheep,” she depicts the crux of revolutionary motivations and the liminal, transnational space of the transitional Iranian state in five images depicting a conversation between Marjane’s father and uncle. Her uncle says, “In a country where half the population is illiterate and you cannot unite the people around Marx, the only thing that can really unite them is a nationalism or a religious ethic,” and her father replies that the elections in favor of the Islamic Republic must have been faked, because 99.9% of the people supposedly voted for it and he personally doesn’t know a single person who wanted it (62). I don’t think it would be appropriate to go into further detail in this graphic novel, because she can only explain so much in this form and she is depicting the situation as it was presented to her as a child. However, it is important that the reader understands this and realizes that this is just a small synopsis and particular point of view of how the revolutionaries became in favor of establishing an Islamic Republic following the collapse of the monarchy. After all, she does not go into much detail at all about Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power and his ability to strategically unite revolutionary protesters across several key demographics to call for the overthrow of Shah Reza Pahlavi.

If Persepolis as a retelling of political history appeals to you, I would highly recommend reading the 9/11 Report in the graphic novel form. For me, this text allowed me to understand a national history I witnessed and was a part of in a way that I had not thought about before. You can read the first chapter here.

When I first read Borderlands/La Frontera four years ago for a seminar class, our assignment was to write an autobiographical poem similar in style to Anzaldúa’s poetry. Given one of the prompts, I thought it would be fun to post this here! It’s fairly self-explanatory, but I might add that in the final stanza, the “Mexican cowboy” is Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who I did a performance art workshop with that same year.

Vocal Cataclysm

My kin never done no foreign talk larnin’.

Hell, they barely knew the King’s English.

They all spoke country, see, the s-language of the Amer’can South.

Mama done tried to fix her tongue when she got that city job.

But she was all hat and no cattle. You could still spot that accent a mile away.

The song had diffrin’ lyrics, but the rhythm was all the same.

But Papa knew I was gonna be the first the leave this one-horse town.

Always said I was quicker than a steel trap. Spoke just like those stars in the picture shows.

His idol was Eastwood, mine was Hepburn. I had the Rain in Spain down by five.

But it was when the schoolhouse opened that I really learned how to talk.

I had just learned to write my name when Sandy Flores came to town.

She was the first one to tell us that there was a south below the South.

She talked funny, so we had to buy a whole new dictionary to understand her.

I found out her last name, Flores, meant “Flowers” in bordertongue,

Which made sense because we listened to her tongue grow each day.

And she twisted our tongues too, teaching us how to turn butter into borregos.

But then Sandy didn’t come around any more.

After giving up on trying to find her, she finally sent a brief letter:

“Gone to find Harriet T. Remember the condor.”

Suddenly the word “Flores” no longer symbolized an image of growth.

I spent all of secondary education trying to know the Other.

I read Lorca, listened to Jacques Brel, and watched del Toro.

I played around with a snow globe I called “North and South”.

I couldn’t really determine where I belonged in that globe.

Then I packed up for Yinzertown.

First to leave the valley, just like Papa always said.

“Kid, you’re no bigger than a minute,” he said, “Don’t let no horse buffalo ya.”

Advice I knew I’d come to partially neglect in the future.

It’s always a struggle, migrating from a flock of eagles to a flock of eagles and condors.

Like everyone else, I witnessed the removal of the “id” from the i-dentity.

That was when I met the Mexican cowboy.

He was a nomadic circus performer that dropped by to lead a cultural fusion workshop.

We would play this game where he would shout out a word and I would definite it.

Migration

A part natural, part man-made delta that universally alters the sense of belonging

Identity

Diamond teeth in a hog’s mouth

Community

The conscious awakening to a primal jungle

Art

The photographic memory of that one good trip

I finally understood the extent of the fluidity of all foreign, all common, all language.

As an American living among the Schwa once said,

“Words provide those extra incisors to bite the hand that feeds us.”

But as a French filmmaker once said,

“Words can lighten the shadows around the thing they designate.”

To-may-to, To-mah-to.

It’s up to us to give them a life of our own.

(Note to instructors: I am not assigned to post this week, so no need to grade this!)

In classes related to transnationalism, I have noticed that professors tend to pair theoretical readings on area studies with works of global literature. This has led me to think about why area studies and national literatures have become such a focus of transnational study. On one level, the answer might be quite obvious. As we begin to visualize and interact with people of all different cultures on a regular basis, whether it is talking to Apple tech support in the Philippines or watching a Korean horror film, scholars of culture might find it important that we study and contextualize these particular cultures and global processes. One could do this by learning more about different world regions in terms of their cultural production and national histories. In this way, students in the West can now further access the communities and cultures that may not have been deemed worthy of extended research in previous decades. Through the historical, anthropological, and narrative study of transnational peoples and spaces, once can better understand the dimensions of cultural diversity around the world, in addition to the hegemonic relations that have historically kept the West as a center of power.

Through an analysis of Modernity at Large by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai and Global Matters by English professor Paul Jay, one can see the interdisciplinary nature of transnationalism in modern academic study, in addition to the value of incorporating area studies and national literature in transnational research. Appadurai introduces an idea that posits old forms of culture against new ones. Historically, he argues, the Enlightenment master narrative “was constructed with a certain internal logic and presupposed a certain relationship between reading, representation, and the public sphere” (36). He claims that cultural forms in today’s world, however, are “fundamentally fractal, that is, as possessing no Euclidean boundaries, structures, or regularities” (46). What allows people around the world to connect with these new cultural forms is not the consumption of a single literary canon, but rather the imagination, which has become “an organized field of social practices…and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility” (31). Here, we have a compelling theoretical argument for a new way to approach culture in the modern moment, but I’m not yet convinced until he provides examples from film, literature, and fieldwork in India to supplement his points. For example, he explains how Mira Nair’s film, India Cabaret, depicts young lower-class women who have been mesmerized and marginalized by the modern metropolitan glamour they see in commercial depictions of Bombay, and the only way they can participate in the spectacle is by becoming exotic dancers who cater to the Western fantasies of the female “Other” (38-39). Thus, the heightened reality of film becomes actual reality in the world of transnational travel and capital. In this way, I think that Appadurai’s transnational theory becomes most useful and effective when he supplements his argument with examples from area studies or works of national film and literature.

In Paul Jay’s account, he questions the “default narrative for historicizing English,” characterized by the study of literature through “the lens of conventional national histories” (loc. 170). One reason for this, he argues, is that the transnational shift in literary studies has led to a “remapping of the locations we study” (loc. 222). In a similar way that Appadurai describes how the approach to cultural study shifted from the Enlightenment’s notion of “Culture” to the more heterogeneous “cultural,” Jay states that the older cultural model of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries collapsed under the “imperative to understand literature as a multicultural object of knowledge…expressive of a whole range of different experiences and identities” (loc. 451). It is here that I can begin to understand my current field of English a bit better. Despite the continued importance of early modern Western literature, how can the field of literary studies, and perhaps the humanities as a whole, continue to expand and flourish if scholars do not question the history of Eurocentrism and consider the literary works of global societies in order to generate new insights on the world and our various positions within it? It is here that I am reminded of a relevant article called “Why American Studies Needs to Think About Korean Cinema,” in which Christina Klein demonstrates how transnational film genres can allow us to explore the various social criticisms of globalization and artistic critiques of the nature of cultural production in the modern world (see article).

Globalization and transnationalism may not be entirely new processes, but in the past few decades, coinciding with rapidly developing telecommunications infrastructures and media technologies in countless international urban centers, these terms are becoming more ever-present in a wide range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. Besides direct communication, how can we start to learn more about people from around the world, who were once in our periphery and are now our neighbors? By including histories and ethnographies of particular cultures along with analyses of national literatures as a part of their arguments, transnational theorists can help expand upon the increasingly interconnected (and simultaneously fragmented) nature of our rapidly evolving world.