Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film Jakub Kazecki 9780810890503

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 Armendariz, Cary Fukunaga, Christoph Hochhausler, Holger Jancke, Emir Kusturica, Laila Pakalnina, Alex Rivera, Larissa Shepitko, Andrea Staka, Elia Suleiman, and Istvan Szabo. 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.

About the Author
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.

Reviews
With this excellently conceived and executed volume, Kazecki, Ritzenhoff, and Miller have collected essays on a topic crucial throughout the history of cinema: that of borders. Border Visions is especially relevant today, in our age of globalization and amid ubiquitous debates about the future of the nation-state and immigration. It is a truly timely, and thoroughly compelling, intervention. -- Jaimey Fisher, associate professor of German and cinema and technocultural studies; Director, Cinema and Technocultural Studies, UC Davis
Border Visions offers fifteen stimulating and accessible case studies of films, many of which have become canonical texts of diasporic and exilic cinema. Taking geopolitical borders and global mobility as the starting point of their investigations, the contributors to this anthology examine transnational journeys and border-crossings of various kinds and bring to the fore the socio-political impetus underpinning this particular type of transnational cinema. The volume's thematic focus makes it a timely and welcome critical intervention in a rapidly growing field. -- Daniela Berghahn, professor of film studies, Royal Holloway, University of London
To all of us who crossed and/or are still crossing borders, your book is an inspiration. Wanderers are now being recognized, and their plight no longer felt or seen as plague. -- Marie-Claire Rohinsky, Ph.D., professor emerita, Central Connecticut State University



Book Information
ISBN 9780810890503
Author Jakub Kazecki
Format Hardback
Page Count 300
Imprint Scarecrow Press
Publisher Scarecrow Press
Weight(grams) 572g
Dimensions(mm) 236mm * 158mm * 26mm