Cultural Spheres
Asynchronous Session
Younès' Harraga and Immigrants' Subjectivities: On Humanizing Immigrant Stories via Rap Music
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Kevin Drif
As of January 26, 2024, the French government passed a law to “control immigration and improve integration”, i.e. to harden the country’s policy on illegal immigration. This law and the media discourses that it generated illustrate the common representations of illegal immigration in France. A discourse focused on ideas of biopolitics, neo-liberal capitalism, and on the “usefulness” or “undesirability” of these populations. Against this dehumanizing approach of immigrant bodies as commodities, some French rappers have decided to use rap music to foreground these often-discarded voices to express their subjectivities before and during their migration journey. With his 2022 song Harraga, an Algerian Arabic word referring to clandestine migrants who leave the Maghreb towards Europe, French rapper of Algerian origin Younès provides a first-person narrative of a migration journey inspired by the real tragedy of Moussa Safir who died at sea in 2011. A textual analysis of the lyrics highlights the complexity of the rationale behind illegal immigration more complex than narratives of financial precarity and a certain easiness to uproot oneself. Furthermore, a media and film analysis of the music video complements the diegesis created by the lyrics through the foregrounding of recurring motifs, notably of the sea as both protective and deadly, and the shrewd use of camera movements to complexify immigrants’ subjectivities. Through this transmedia analysis, this study recenters immigrants’ stories, and highlights the complexity of their migration journey before they even make it, if they do, to their destination.
Featured Analyzing the Absence of Malice Movie, Focusing on Facts Vs. Assumptions: Impact of Assumptions View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Sonika Lamichhane
This study examines the interplay between facts and assumptions presented in the movie Absence of Malice 1981. A reporter, Megan Carter, writes a news story on the front page of the newspaper that links Michael Gallagher, a businessman, to a murder investigation without verifying the information. The movie has shown how the reporter, Megan Carter, wrote the story without seeking confirmation and how a lack of verifying the information and premature reporting harm the people. Through visual analysis, this study considers the characters, plot, dialogue, and facial expression of the movie to analyze the importance of fact in the news story and how assumptions, prioritizing speed to cover the story, and a lack of verification of news can hamper the people and break the journalistic principles, i.e., accuracy, balance, and credibility. Furthermore, this study also draws connections to real-world instances of journalistic practices. This study highlights responsible journalism and the importance of cross-verification of information to safeguard the trust of the public and to maintain the credibility of the media houses.
The Transculturality of an “Open” Concept of Translation: The Case of Italian Female Writer Dacia Maraini
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Dagmar Reichardt
As recent Translation Studies show, translatory dynamics are closely connected to global transmigration and social transformation processes (Nergaard 2021). In this talk, I will introduce to Italy’s best known female writer Dacia Maraini (b. 1936) and her life and work in the fields of literature, theater, culture and politics. Born in Tuscany, raised in Japan and Sicily, she has lived and made her career in Rome since the 1950s and is Italy’s most engaged, successful and internationally recognized female author today. Focusing on the opus omnia of Maraini its translations during the last 60 years around the world represent a symbolic glocal contact zone (Haensler et al. 2022; Pratt 1992) that incorporates the original books written by Maraini in Italian while highlighting the transcultural function of translations and translators, too often underestimated (Casanova 2008). Unified in an overview of all translations, Maraini’s original and translated oeuvre proposes a decentralized, diasporic concept of a multilingual world literature in the Third Millennium. Working with an “open” concept of translation by adapting Umberto Eco’s notion of an “open work” (Eco 1962) I illustrate to what an extend translations contribute to a polyglot view of the world, while enhancing differences of literary hospitality in diversified (language-related) cultural spheres. The bridging function of translated texts reawake in the reader a sensitivity for all that could appear other, different, or foreign. At the same time, it unveils that cross-border sociality itself corresponds to a perennial act of translation.
Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley, American Poets: Bridging Oceans, Healing the Divisions
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Linda Nicole Blair
Anne Bradstreet and family set sail from Southampton, immigrating to the new Colonies in 1630, settling in what would become the United States. In 1761, a young African child crossed the ocean in a slave ship, the Phillis, from which she took her first name. She was alone on the slave auction block when the Wheatley family purchased her to work as a house slave. Both women grew up to become internationally lauded poets; both left an indelible mark on the United States, their legacies taking starkly different directions. The split in this perspective, between the privileged and the less fortunate, divides us today, defining our national conversations about the influence of wealth on local and national elections. Do we favor the wealthy, or those less fortunate, who are equally well-deserving of living a productive life? The American presidential election drew a bold line between the haves and have nots, but more than that, between those who care only about power and those who care about a healthy distribution of power, regardless of economic status. In 2024, the ugly “color line” between citizens and immigrants has emerged—under the present governmental administration, that line has become a dangerous divider that threatens great harm to, and even greater division among, the citizenry. Combining literature and history, I address the oceans of difference that divide Americans, the rich set of opportunities we have to bridge those divides, and the actions we can take to overcome this present wave of neo-populism and neo-nationalism.
