The fourth issue of /DESI/ will focus on the question of encounters in diasporic South Asian cinema: Afghanistan, India, Maldives, Pakistan, Bangladesh Nepal and Sri Lanka. The transformation of this contemporary human condition into filmic material coincides with a turn in the scientific study of diasporas. Forced migrations, which generate a movement of displacement and settlement in home territories, movements of arrivals, caught in a logic of deterritorialization, diasporas – and more particularly South Asian diasporas – are all relocated in transnational and transcultural spaces. Cinema holds a mirror to this experience of movement through this new “ethnoscape” (Appadurai) made up of shifts and disjunctures, free flows and political hurdles, border-crossings and assignment of identity.

Argument

The fourth issue of /DESI/ will focus on the question of encounters in diasporic South Asian cinema ;: Afghanistan, India, Maldives, Pakistan, Bangladesh Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Jacques Audiard’s 2015 Palme d’or for /Dheepan/ is proof that the representation of diasporas has become mainstream. The second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century have indeed inaugurated a new era for diasporas, ie the voluntary or forced migration of populations and communities from a territory of origin to a new territory of identity attachment.

The transformation of this contemporary human condition into filmic material coincides with a turn in the scientific study of diasporas. Forced migrations, which generate a movement of displacement and settlement in home territories, movements of arrivals, caught in a logic of deterritorialization, diasporas – and more particularly South Asian diasporas – are all relocated in transnational and transcultural spaces. Cinema holds a mirror to this experience of movement through this new “ethnoscape” (Appadurai) made up of shifts and disjunctures, free flows and political hurdles, border-crossings and assignment of identity.

Diasporas, as both transnationals realities and empirical definitions of imagined and deterritotarialized communities, can conceptualize the complex transnational networks which link the desi groups to South Asian and host nations

Diasporic cinema is a hybrid, non monolithic form, and has become the privileged witness to the consequences of globalisation and broadens the postcolonial question. The study of a corpus of  ;films coming from diasporic communities, in the the wake of postcolonial studies, has deeply renewed the field of film studies.

The corpus of diasporic cinema follows a triple definition; first, it concerns films produced, written by members of the South Asian diaspora or in which they perform; it also includes, Indian, Pakistani, Bengladeshi, Sri Lankan etc. films whose subject matter is the South Asian diasporic condition; third, the corpus also includes films produced in India whose main audience is the South Asian diaspora.

Its language of expression can be the language of the host country, a European language articulated as part of what Hamid Naficy calls an “accented cinema”. This felicitous definition insists on the autobiographical dimension of the film and often includes a reflexion on the exilic condition. Its hybrid tinkered aspect, made up of different genres or different techniques, places it in an in-between space within the host country’s national cinema industry. Sandhya Suri’s /I for India/ (2005) is a canonical example.

By definition a space of negotiation and encounters, diasporic cinema follows the Deleuzian “witch’s flight” which opens another space of representation, conforming to a “minor” cinema, following the logic of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

“Encounters” in South Asian diasporic cinema can therefore be taken quite literally as the the representation of the confrontation between two cultures, or in its economic economic representation, as the study of the financing networks. The role of international cinemas can also be taken into account in the creation of the aesthetic norms of /desi/ cinema.

Articles will be reviewed on a blind peer-to-peer basis by the journal’s international reading committee. Articles can be published in French or English

Submission guidelines

Deadline : 15 juillet

adresse d'envoi paul.veyret@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr
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Editiorial board

• JF Baillon, U Bordeaux Montaigne,
• Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud, U de Bordeaux
• Zeenat Saleh, U de Besançon
• Melvin Stokes, University College, London
• Paul Veyret UBM
• Christian Viviani, U de Caen

Reading board

• Mamuna Ghani, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur.
• Christine Ithurbide, U Paris-Diderot
• Kamala Marius UBM
• Framji Minwalla, Habib University, Karachi
• Aminah Mohammed-Arif, CEIAS, Paris
• Catherine Servan-Schreiber, CEIAS, Paris
• Pierre-Yves Trouillet, CEIAS, Paris
• Aurèle Varrel, CEIAS, Paris