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Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe examines a variety of films from the early 1990s that depict and address the lives and identities of both first-generation immigrants and children of the diaspora in Europe. Whether they are authored by immigrants themselves or by white Europeans who use the resources and means of production of dominant cinema to politically engage with the immigrants’ predicaments, these films, Isolina Ballesteros shows, are unmappable—a condition resulting from immigration cinema’s recombination and deliberate blurring of filmic conventions pertaining to two or more genres. In an age of globalization and increased migration, this book theorizes immigration cinema in relation to notions such as gender, hybridity, transculturation, border crossing, transnationalism, and translation.

288 pages | 15 halftones | 7 x 9 | © 2015

Film Studies


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Reviews

"This is a very timely and necessary book likely to attract considerable interest from a wide range of disciplines beyond Film and European Studies, and deservedly so. Throughout the seven chapters of this extremely engaging and clearly structured monograph, Ballesteros convincingly argues that immigration cinema challenges traditional notions of film genre and auteurism, as well as certain aesthetic conventions that Film Studies as a discipline has taken for granted until now. Through careful consideration of a plethora of admirably well-picked case studies from across Europe (mostly from the 1990s and 2000s), the book demonstrates how immigration cinema’s defiance and blurring of previously established aesthetic, industrial and thematic parameters mirrors the way in which migratory movements question and defy geopolitical borders. The ongoing re-definition and re-negotiation of the problematic relationship between Europe and its nations also underlies Ballesteros’ argument. Appropriately, the book also touches on political debates around pervasive relevant issues such as Islamic extremism or the global financial downturn of recent years. . . . This book is a must-read source for any student  or researcher not only of immigration cinema in Europe, but also for those interested in European identities, European cinemas and immigration more generally, for generations to come."

International Journal of Iberian Studies

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Contextualizing Immigration Cinema
Chapter 1: Race, Mobile Masculinities, and Class
Chapter 2: Female Transnational Migrations and Diasporas
Chapter 3: Human Trafficking and the Global Sex Slave Trade
Chapter 4: Queer Immigration and Diasporas: Performative Identities, Cross-Dressing Displacement/Assimilation
Chapter 5: The European Family in the Face of Otherness: Family Metaphors and the Redemption of White Guilt
Chapter 6: Border-Crossing Road Movies: Inverted Odysseys and Roads to Dystopia
Chapter 7: Identities In-Between in Diasporic Cinema
Index of Films

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