12 - Micropolitics of the Migrant Family in Accented Cinema: Love and Creativity in Empire

Summary

In their seminal work about contemporary transnational society, Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri give a special place to the body of the migrant. Because the migrant refuses the local constraints of his human condition and searches for a new life and a new identity, he is positively labeled a “new barbarian” who opposes any form of normalization, one of which is the family. While Hardt and Negri are optimistic about the dissolution of the family through migration, Hamid Naficy seems more cautious in this respect. In his book on transnational migratory, exilic and diasporic cinema, An Accented Cinema,Naficy argues that many films that deal with migration demonstrate how difficult and even impossible it is to really leave everything behind. The role of the camera is in this respect very significant. Through the camera, Naficy argues, the filmmaker can create a new identity indeed. He calls this a performative or discursive identity that is established by the use of the camera. However, to what extent these new identities are free from (family) constraints is more ambiguous.

In this chapter, I want to read some of the general and abstract ideas about the migrant body that have been developed by Hardt and Negri in dialogue with the more concrete images of “accented” migratory films as developed by Naficy. I will look at three films considered to be accented films, in that they deal with issues of migration: BOUJAD, A NEST IN THE HEAT (Bellabes, Morocco/Canada, 1992-1995), DES VACANCES MALGRÉ TOUT (Malek Bensmail, Algeria/France, 2000), and MILLE ET UN JOURS (Mieke Bal et al., Netherlands/France/Tunisia, 2003). By analyzing these films and the way in which they relate to contemporary society, and by going back to some of the Deleuzian and Spinozist inspirations of Hardt and Negri's thoughts on Empire, I will argue that the family is not as easily, happily, or necessarily “shot” as Hardt and Negri seem to suggest. Or perhaps that, contrary to Hardt and Negri, one of the ways of resisting in Empire is precisely by shooting the family – with a camera.