Suchergebnisse

The question of migration and border control has become a litmus test for governments, democracies, and civil societies around the world in recent years. In our era of highspeed digital connectivity people acquire knowledge about the world primarily as long-distance spectators through moving images flickering on portable screens. The common framing of migrants moving in a caravan or huddled on an overcrowded boat is occasionally punctuated by a photograph gone viral, for example, of the drowned Syrian boy on a Turkish shore or the crying little girl from Honduras at the US-Mexican border, looking up her mother's legs as a guard is patting her down. These images have made a stronger imprint on the public perception of crisis than any research publication on migration. Meanwhile, the question arises if saddening images of dead or distraught toddlers in red t-shirts are effective in mobilizing affective engagement with the human cost of violent borders. Moreover, it is unclear whether such spectatorial empathy can translate into critique and action. The direct appeal of framed helpless children offers first and foremost a safe outlet for shock and pity that affords no political intervention or systemic change. The victimizing gaze on migrants falls short of imagining possibilities of coexistence, collaboration, and a shared future. Are there alternatives to passively watching the pain of others, the suffering of refugees detained at borders, rescued at sea, or trapped in camps? What might the world look like through the lens of migration? And how can we begin to conceptualize an open city based on participation and interaction?

The Turkish-German axis is not the first route that comes to mind when rethinking German cinema in a global perspective. Turks in German cinema have tended to be cast in one-dimensional roles, as victims on the margins of society, unable to communicate and integrate. After more than four decades of Turkish presence in Germany, can we finally observe a new trend in representation, focusing more on playful enactments, mutual mirroring, and border-crossings? In an era of increasing global mobility of people and media, questions about the status of transnational cultural productions by travelers, emigrants, and exiles have achieved a new intensity. Film critics, concomitantly, have begun to call for a new genre category, one which explodes the boundaries of "original" national cultures as well as those of cinematic conventions. This new genre is variously labeled "independent transnational cinema," (Naficy, 1996) "postcolonial hybrid films" (Shohat and Stam, 1994) or simply "world cinema," (Roberts, 1998) a descriptor which, in contrast to older separatist categories such as "third world cinema" (Pines and Willemen, 1989) or "sub-state cinema" (Crofts, 1998), stresses the universality of mobility and diversity.

A foreword to Isabel Dzierson's review of Interkultur, by Mark Terkessidis; Alex Lambrow's review of Tracking Europe: Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics of Location, by Ginette Verstraete; and Özgür Yaren's review of European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, edited by Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg.

How does migration change a nation? Germany in Transit is the first sourcebook to illuminate the country's transition into a multiethnic society--from the arrival of the first guest workers in the mid-1950s to the most recent reforms in immigration and citizenship law. The book charts the highly contentious debates about migrant labor, human rights, multiculturalism, and globalization that have unfolded in Germany over the past fifty years--debates that resonate far beyond national borders. This cultural history in documents offers a rich archive for the comparative study of modern Germany against the backdrop of European integration, transnational migration, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Divided into eleven thematic chapters, Germany in Transit includes 200 original texts in English translation, as well as a historical introduction, chronology, glossary, bibliography, and filmography