Border Crossings and Mobilities on Screen

Ruxandra Trandafoiu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367650667
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000600988
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Border Crossings and Mobilities on Screen explores the movement, fluidity and change characterizing contemporary life, as represented on screen media, from mobile devices, to television, film, computers, video art and advertising displays.

People have never moved around more, and increasingly migration and mobility has come to shape both our understandings of ourselves, and the ways in which we interpret and mediate the world we live in. As people move, media plays a key role in shaping and reshaping identity and belonging, opening the doors to transnational and transcultural participation. Drawing on screen media case studies from around the world, this book demonstrates how screen mobilities reconfigure notions of space, place, network and border regimes. The increasing ease of consumption and production of media has allowed for an unprecedented fluidity and mobility of class, gender, sexuality, nation and transnation, individual freedoms and aspirations. Putting people at the core of the book, this book shows the many ways in which people are using screen media to create identity, participation and meaning. The rich picture built up over the many chapters of this interdisciplinary volume raise important questions about the nature of contemporary media experiences.

At a time of great change in the ways in which people move and connect with each other, this book provides an important global snapshot for researchers across the fields of media, communication and screen studies; sociology of communication; global studies and transnationalism; cultural studies; culture and identity; digital cultures; travel, tourism and place.

Part I
Border crossings

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127703-2

In Part I, authors explore the dissolution of borders, actual or symbolic, as a result of crossings which lead to new encounters, new roads, new journeys, new connections, new symbolic capital and new forms of self-awareness. Paradoxically, perhaps, border crossings highlight the relevance of borders and rebordering attempts, but also the potential of dismantling them or making them porous through crossing, documenting crossing and self-mediating.

Mădroane and Baya’s chapter depicts how transnational families instrumentalise emotion to symbolically enact border crossings through the act of passing food from home (Romania) to children settled in the UK. Mobility geographies are made visible by travel and are shaped by care-giving at a distance. The journalists documenting this process through video reportage become ethnographers while they engage in multiple border crossings themselves.

Fernández Labayen and Gutiérrez’s chapter describes the border crossing attempts by Sub-Saharan migrants whose video cell recordings become performative interventions against enforced immobility (physical, affective and symbolic). They argue that ‘necropolitics’ is used as a form of programmed violence which aims to (re)materialise borders. Migrant videos reshape both symbolic and territorial borders by attempting to counter instances of immobilisation, contention and deportation. The videos thus become instances of resistance through self-mediation.

Santos and Néia’s chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the Brazilian telenovela Orphans of a Nation (Órfãos da Terra), which focuses on a Syrian family’s resettlement in Brazil. Refugee mobility in Orphans of a Nation challenges the very outlining of borders and helps reimagine the Brazilian nation as modern and tolerant, in contrast with the distant and exotic Oriental ‘other’. The Brazilian telenovela’s moral approach as a vehicle for cultivating tolerance also helps viewers cross the border between the ‘narrated world’ and the nation’s ‘lived world’.

The chapter by Kyriakidou, Morani and Willmington looks at whether the COVID-19 pandemic has produced a new representational universe for minorities in the UK that is shifting traditionally negative narratives. Their analysis finds that the pandemic has helped break down some barriers through rare instances of visibility that better exemplify the experiences and struggles of ethnic minorities within the country. However, the belonging of immigrant workers and their construction as ‘ideal’ migrants in public discourse is conditioned on their contributions to the national health service and their ‘love’ of the country. The pandemic thus became a missed opportunity to reconsider and challenge established narratives about immigration and mobility as threats to the national borders.

For Atay too, border crossings represent a challenge, even when the migrant/diasporan is actively engaged in self-mediation. He describes what is lost and what is gained in the process of digital mediation of diasporic queer mobilities. Through narratives of recurrent dislocations, Atay analyses the moving back and forth through which diasporic, transnational and immigrant lives are transformed and morphed into new realities. Migrants become cyber entities undergoing pixelated experiences, concomitantly connected and disconnected, while they manoeuvre around nation-states, cross borders and step into and out of different cultures.

1 Mobility and transnational relationships in alternative media discourse Migration actors, objects and emotions on the road

Irina Diana Mădroane and Adina Baya

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127703-3

Introduction

In an article about the semiotic of the food parcel that Romanian mums send their children when they are away, the anthropologist Vintilă Mihăilescu wrote that the food ‘from home’ ‘is not from the marketplace, it is not even “asgrandma makes it” or “asMum makes it at home”, it is from Mum. It is Mum’ (2018, our translation, added emphases), thus stressing the fact that it has the capacity to instantly recreate affective bonds across space. This chapter looks into the symbolic construction in alternative media of transnational forms of identification and connection that are developed and sustained through mobility and home/place-making practices, permeated with affect and emotion. Our exploratory analysis examines a video reportage by the Romanian online publication Recorder, starting from the hypothesis that it offers viewers specific semiotic resources for interpretation, identity building in transnational contexts and engagement in the transnational social field. Titled ‘Diaspora la pachet’/‘Diaspora in a Parcel’¹ (Udişteanu and Muntean 2019), the video reportage, released on 28 December 2019, follows en route Christmas food parcels sent by families in Romanian villages to their migrant members in London and Coventry, parcels that are carriers of affects, emotions and memories of the home(land). It enjoyed popularity on social media² (most prominently on Facebook and YouTube), reaching both diasporic and non-diasporic publics, and being widely circulated in the context of the family-centred winter holiday season.

We aim to bring out the characteristic ways in which an alternative media publication attempts to grant visibility to ordinary migrant and non-migrant actors engaged in regular mobilities and emotion-ridden interactions within transnational families and communities. Our points of reference for comparison are findings on the construction of Romanian intra-EU migration as a public problem (Beciu et al. 2018), which reveal an instrumentalization of the diaspora in mainstream media and political discourse. Reified identity categories (the ‘diaspora’, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ Romanian migrants, the ‘heroes’ and the ‘slaves’/‘victims’) have thus been strategically used by public actors to formulate stances and claims regarding other issues (such as Romania’s country image), to mobilize or to reposition Romania as an EU member-state in a transnational field of power relations (Beciu et al. 2018). As shown by Beciu and Lazăr (2016), the mainstream media representations of the migrants’ mobilities are well integrated into such discursive mechanisms, resulting in visibility patterns of mobility geographies, processes and identities that are essentialized, dramatized and instrumentalized. The ensuing repertoire, they conclude, ‘circumvents the ways in which these actors foster meaningful relationships and roles’ in the transnational social field (Beciu and Lazăr 2016: 54).

Our working hypothesis is that, as an alternative media publication, the Recorder seeks to capture for its publics the ‘meaningful relationships and roles’ that migrants develop across borders in relation to their families and communities in the localities of origin and destination. We regard the verbal and visual representations in the video reportage as semiotic resources that diasporic and non-diasporic publics could use to interpret transnational migration phenomena and spaces, as well as to negotiate their identities and belongings to transnational communities (Georgiou 2006). Within this frame, a special focus will be on emotion in relation to the migrants’ subjective engagement, an under-researched area in transnational migration studies (Boccagni and Baldassar 2015). Our chapter will give insights into the distinct alternative media construction and performance of mobility practices that connect migrants and non-migrants in transnational contexts. We begin by conceptualizing transnational identity and relationship building through the lens of practices of home-/place-making, emotions and mobilities.

Mobilities, home-/place-making and emotions in transnational relationships

Transnational migrant identities are understood here as hybrid, dynamic and formed through the relations developed between social actors, between social actors and places (as physical, material, social and symbolic configurations), and through the mobilities characteristic of late modernity (Conradson and Mckay 2007; Urry 2007; Easthope 2009; Elliott and Urry 2010). Migration displaces social actors from their homes, families and communities and re-emplaces them in the localities of destination, where new homes are created, in other communities, a process that entails re-appropriations and the maintenance of material, social, affective and symbolic ties with the former. The cross-border movements of people, objects, information and images are thus constitutive of the migrants’ identities and relationships with their kin and with the local and national communities in the countries of origin and destination, being also shaped by structural inequalities and power relations (Ahmed et al. 2003; Conradson and McKay 2007; Urry 2007; Easthope 2009; Elliott and Urry 2010; Pearce 2019; Colomer-Solsona 2020). From this perspective, mobility practices are central to the (re)production of the transnational social field, defined as ‘a set of multiple, interlocking networks of social relationships’ stretching across borders (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004: 1009).

Mobility, however, is only one dimension thereof. In transnational families, achieving ‘co-presence’ (Baldassar 2008) or ‘simultaneity of connection’ between home and host destinations (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004) also rests upon the ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild, cited in Baldassar 2008) of care-giving at a distance. Transnational ‘co-presence’ may be ‘virtual’, i.e. realized through communication technologies, ‘by proxy’, achieved ‘indirectly through objects and people whose physical presence embodies the spirit of the longed for absent person or place’ (recreated through the senses, by touching or holding the objects), ‘physical’ and ‘imagined’ (Baldassar 2008: 252ff.). The forms of mobility such ‘co-presence’ involves are prompted and upheld by affects and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Border crossings
• PART II Transnational encounters
• PART III Connections and dislocations
• PART IV Symbolic geographies
• Index