Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art

This volume analyzes innovative forms of media and music (art installations, television commercials, photography, films, songs, telenovelas) to examine the performance of migration in contemporary culture. Though migration studies and media studies are ostensibly different fields, this transnational collection of essays addresses how their interconnection has shaped our understanding of the paradigms through which we think about migration, ethnicity, nation, and the transnational. Cultural representations intervene in collective beliefs. Art and media clearly influence the ways the experience of migration is articulated and recalled, intervening in individual perceptions as well as public policy.
To understand the connection between migration and diverse media, the authors examine how migration is represented in film, television, music, and art, but also how media shape the ways in which host country and homeland are imagined. Among the topics considered are new mediated forms for representing migration, widening the perspective on the ways these representations may be analyzed; readings of enactments of memory in trans- and inter-disciplinary ways; and discussions of globalization and transnationalism, inviting us to rethink traditional borders in respect to migration, nation states, as well as disciplines.

Rocío G. Davis is Professor of English at the City University of Hong Kong. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung is Senior Lecturer at the English Department of Heidelberg University, Germany. Johanna C. Kardux is the Director of American Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

List of Figures Introduction: Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art, Rocio G. Davis, Dorothea Fisher-Hornung, and Johanna C. Kardux Part I. Border Crossings and (Trans)nationalism in Film 1: Paradigms of Attitudes Towards Immigration: Science Fiction Films as Allegories in the Mid-Century, Juan Bruce-Novoa 2: No Country for Old Certainties: Ambivalence, Hybridity, and Dangerous Crossings in Three Borderland Films, Page Laws 3: Bodies and Hybrid Tropes: Border Crossings in Recent Films, Cathy Covell Waegner 4: From Alien Nation to Alienation: Tracing the Figure of the Guest Worker in Fatih Akin's Gegen die Wand, Tessa C. Lee 5: "Lunch with the Bigot": 9/11 in Bollywood's Filmic Imagination, Mita Banerjee Part II. Migrant Adaptations in Television 6: Invisible Ethnicity: Canadian Erasure, Vanishing Dutchness, Aritha Van Herk 7: Performing Linguistic Identity and Integration: The Politics of Interpellation in the Catalonian Media, Klaus Zilles 8: The Trans/migrant in the Spotlight: Space and Movement in Brazilian Telenovelas, Gundo Rial y Costas Part III. Traveling Sounds: Music and Migration 9: Migratory Objects in the Balkans: When the Sound of the Other Sounds Strangely Familiar, Maria Boletsi 10: Variations on a Fugitive's Song: The Performance of Disappearance and Forced Migration in Chile, Nicolás Salazar-Sutil 11: Immigration and Modernism: Arnold Schoenberg and the Los Angeles Émigrés, Kenneth J. Marcus Part IV. Performing Ethnicity and Migration: Cultural and Artistic Practices 12: Ethnic Nostalgia: Ethnicity as Cultural Practice in the Twenty-First Century, Marcus Embry 13: Connoisseurs of Urban Life: Aesthetic Practices and the Everyday Among Japanese Migrants in New York City, Olga Kanzaki Sooudi 14: "All Islands Connect Under Water": Ping Chong's Undesirable Elements Series, Roberta De Martini Notes on Contributors Index