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Title: New Modernity, Transnational Women, And Spanish Cinema (Critical Essay)
Author : Maria Van Liew
Release Date : January 01, 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 96 KB

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As a self-proclaimed "European conscript," Stuart Hall offers the perspective of being "in but not of Europe," a vantage point that disputes Europe's claim to be somehow autochthonous and capable of producing itself from within (60). Hall explains that European identity, although premised on an imagined "sameness," is constructed through difference, thereby affirming the importance of what is, in fact, outside. Many contemporary Spanish films about immigration contribute to a critical inquiry of the power relations inherent within notions of cultural hybridity, the likes of which are often fueled by governmental and economic policies attempting to legislate and legitimate the return of Spain's historical relationship with its former colonial periphery, namely Latin America: "So nations--and supra-national communities--if they are to hang together, and construct a sense of belongingness amongst their members--cannot simply be political, economic or geographical entities; they also depend on how they are represented and imagined: they exist within, not outside, representation, the imaginary" (Hall 61). Shifting boundaries owing to the current re-zoning of European borders are becoming the recognizable norm that marks a generic fabric of cinematic representation as equally mutative in its inclusion of "non-European" protagonists who represent the arrival of "Third World" bodies to "First World" loci. The tendency of contemporary Spanish films about is to highlight the centrality of these bodies despite their liminal status to the (inter)national image of Spain. Hall maintains that "the lowering of barriers within Europe, the coming together around the "lingua franca" of a common market in goods, capital and ideas, the incorporation of a 'wider Europe' which the modern "myth" of the Euro is supposed to symbolize, each continues to display its reverse side. What is "open" within is increasingly barred without" (67). In the Spanish films about immigration under study here, Iciar Bollain's Flores de otro mundo (1999) and Fernando Leon de Aranoa's Princesas (2005), the "illegal" arrival of Caribbean protagonists shakes things up from the inside and forces Spain to re-imagine these encounters as "native" and "natural," thereby attaching the liminal qualities of immigration drama to practices of national identification as inclusive and modern. While transnational subjects are a fixture in most European films about immigration, the aesthetic result often remains intimately linked to the social and political structures of the host region/city/town, a landscape which, in turn, exhibits traces of its Eurocentric national "past." Intriguing in these films is how "First World" loneliness prompts some Spaniards to identify with their Caribbean counterparts and to receive the "Third World" lovingly. Nonetheless, the inequalities, differences, and solidarities that arise from these "new" arrivals indebted to globalization offer a complex palette of reactions and expectations. The newness of these migrations to Spain, beginning in the 1980s with Spain's economic recovery--stirs up memories of older histories of colonialism, racism, and sexism, contemporaneous with the films' narrative structures comprised of disruptions in the traditional fabric of social and economic interaction. The flow of human traffic in this respect defies two aspects of European modernity: Non-linear time is reflected in the cycle of arrival/return/return (the latter once two homes have been established) as the nation relies on liminal subjects to determine its status as a progressive First World nation; and in the effort to align representations of these cultural encounters accordingly, illusions of autochthonous national identity formations become dependent on practices of inclusion and, at times, cooptation of "the other" within. Nearly a decade after Montxo Armendariz's groundbreaking film Las cartas de Alou (1990), Bollain's contemporary tale of imported love offer