Realism and national identity in 'Y Tu Mamá También': an audience perspective

When referring to cinema and its emancipatory potential, realism, like Plato’s pharmakon, has signified both illness and cure, poison and medicine. On the one hand, realism is regarded as the main feature of so-called classical cinema, inherently conservative and thoroughly ideological, its main raison d’être being to reify and make a particular version of the status quo believable and to pass it out as ‘reality’ (Burch, 1990; MacCabe, 1974). On the other, realism has also been interpreted as a quest for truth and social justice, as in the positivist ethos that informs documentary (Zavattini, 1953). Even in the latter sense, however, the extent to which realism has served colonizing ends when used to investigate the ‘truth’ of the Other has also been noted, rendering the form profoundly suspicious (Chow, 2007, p. 150). For realism has been a Western form of representation, one that can be traced back to the invention of perspective in painting and that peaked with the secular worldview brought about by the Enlightenment. And like realism, the nation state too is a product of the Enlightenment, nationalism being, as it were, a secular replacement for the religious - that is enchanted or fantastic - worldview. In this way, realism, cinema and nation are inextricably linked, and equally strained under the current decline of the Enlightenment paradigm. This chapter looks at Y tu Mamá También by Alfonso Cuarón (2001), a highly successful road movie with documentary features, to explore the ways in which realism, cinema and nation interact with each other in the present conditions of ‘globalization’ as experienced in Mexico. The chapter compares and contrasts various interpretations of the role of realism in this film put forward by critics and scholars and other discourses about it circulating in the media with actual ways of audience engagement with it.

Mockumentary as postnationalism: national identity in 'A Day Without a Mexican' by Sergio Arau

The turn to neoliberalism in the 1990s proved decisive for Mexico, as the NAFTA project embraced by the Salinas administration entailed a re-definition of national identity, defined since the revolution as mestizo, Catholic and especially as the Other to the United States. And just as cinema was in those days a crucial discourse for this particular construction of the identity, it was in the 1990s equally instrumental to its redefinition, which largely focused on the role of migrants to the US, presented even as supplementary in the Derridean sense. In 1992, as part of these efforts, Sergio Arau directed a mockumentary which in 2004 became a feature film, ‘A Day Without a Mexican’. As would befit more the seriousness of a documentary than the excess and parody of mockumentary, the stated aim in both was to advance a social agenda, arguing the case for immigrant labour and for Mexican presence in the US more generally. The film charts what would happen in California were all Latino immigrants to suddenly disappear, arguing chaos would ensue. Given the link between cinema and modernity and the relevance of cinema for the nation as an alternative public sphere, this chapter looks at the implications of choosing mockumentary, taken by many to be a paradigmatic postmodern and hybrid form, to discuss the hybridisation of national identity in a transnational film, in the present age of globalisation.

Negotiating national identity on film: competing readings of Zhang Yimou’s 'Hero'

How are national identities transformed? If they are mostly narratives of belonging to a community of history and destiny to which people subscribe, those boundary-making procedures that constitute the political field by instituting differences can provide a tentative answer to this question. This paper is concerned with one such cultural practice, namely film-viewing. Globalisation, a boundary-blurring practice, has been the backdrop against which transformations in national identity are often discussed, either bemoaned as cultural imperialism or celebrated as ongoing hybridisation. This piece of research took Zhang Yimou’s controversial film Hero as a point of departure, and asked groups of Chinese audiences how they understood the Chinese identity it conveys. Although it is still a work in progress, provisional results are reported below.

Chicano identity and discourses of supplementarity on Mexican cinema: from ‘The Man Without a Fatherland’ (Contreras Torres: 1922) to ‘Under the Same Moon’ (Riggen: 2008)

A radical change took place in Mexican narratives of belonging during the 1990s, when NAFTA was first negotiated. Narratives of migration drastically changed the status of Mexican migrants to the US, formerly derided as ‘pochos’, presenting them as model citizens instead. Following Derrida, I argue the role of the migrant became that of a supplement, which is, discursively, at the same time external to and part of a given unit, standing for and allowing deeper transformations to take place in the whole discourse of bilateral relations and national identity more generally. I use Derrida’s concept of the supplement to discuss changing representations of Chicanos in Mexican cinema, and to assess the extent that they have succeeded in reframing the discourse on national identity, with a focus on gender.

A social history of sport in Cork, Tipperary and Waterford, c. 1880-1930

This thesis seeks to explore the development of sport in Munster in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by comparing developments in three counties: Cork, Tipperary and Waterford. In particular this thesis considers the development of rugby and soccer in comparative perspective across these three counties, asking what local factors impacted on their uneven development in the region and considering the extent to which the traditional model of diffusion applies to the reception of these sports in the three counties. By giving consideration to these two particular non-indigenous sports, the thesis will, through answering that question, explore ideas of cultural reception, national identity and class as expressed at local level. These themes will be explored by placing the comparative analysis of these two sports into a wider context of sporting development regionally and nationally in the period, in particular the emerging commercialisation of sport, and also the diverse sporting culture of which these two sports were a part. Utilising a wide range of archival sources from local, national and sporting newspapers, to club records, official publications and ephemera this thesis builds a picture of sport in Munster that is deeply rooted in the community, and that forms an important facet of the social world of Cork, Tipperary and Waterford from 1880-1930.

Chicana poetics: genre and style in Gloria Anzaldúa and Lorna Dee Cervantes

This thesis conducts a formal study of the poetry of Gloria Anzaldúa and Lorna Dee Cervantes, placing their work in dialogue with genre and style. These two Chicana poets are exemplary of politicised experimentation with poetics, underpinned by a keen awareness of the rich history of form, genre and style. In the work of each poet, two poetic modes are examined: one traditional, and one experimental. Anzaldúa’s uses of the dramatic monologue as a border genre, and her construction of [auto]poetics, stemming from her multi-genre, autobiographical approach to writing, are considered. Cervantes’s complex approach to the construction of docupoetics that achieves a depth of field in terms of merging a multidimensional approach to aesthetics with highly politicised transnational content, as well as her engagement with the longstanding poetic of elegy via various formal points of entry, is investigated. These poetic modes are primarily explored via close readings, supported by a multidisciplinary framework that includes Anzaldúa’s feminist theories of identity and writing, abjection theory, postcolonialism, and transnationalism. Overall, these four key areas demonstrate the ways in which aesthetics is a crucial consideration in the exploration of the broader issues of content and context in Chicana poetry.

Remembrance of the ancestors in contemporary paganism: Lineage, identity, and cultural belonging in the Irish context

This article explores some of the ways of remembering and honouring the ancestors in contemporary Pagan religious traditions, with a focus on the Irish context. An overview is provided of how the "ancestors" are conceptualised within Paganism, as well as where they are believed to be located in the afterlife or Otherworld. Veneration of ancestral peoples is a significant part of many Pagan rituals. Some methods of honouring the dead, and contacting the dead, through ritual practices are described. Remembering and honouring the dead, whether distant forebears or more recent relatives, is particularly important during the Pagan celebration of the festival of Samhain, feast of the dead, on October 31. Issues around ancestors, lineages and ethnicity are significant in many Pagan traditions, and attention is paid to these factors in terms of the Irish Pagan community's sense of cultural belonging as well as their sense of place in a physical respect in relation to the landscape, proximity of sacred sites, and other features of their geographical location.

Straw - structured reading, analysis and writing in humanities disciplines

Technology provides a range of tools which facilitate parts of the process of reading, analysis and writing in humanities, but these tools are limited and poorly integrated. Methods of providing students with the skills to make good use of a range of tools to create an integrated, structured process of writing in the disciplines are examined, compared and critiqued. Tools for mindmapping and outlining are examined both as reading tools and as tools to structure knowledge and explore ontology creation. Interoperability between these and common wordprocessors is examined in order to explore how students may be taught to develop a structured research and writing process using currently available tools. Requirements for future writing tools are suggested

The many voices of Piedmont: language, identity and alterity in the works of modern and contemporary Piedmontese writers

The aim of this project is to carry out a linguistic analysis of a group of modern and contemporary narratives written by authors from the same Italian region: Piedmont. The novels and short stories examined stand out for the intriguing ways in which they move between a variety of idioms – Italian, Piedmontese dialects, English and pastiches, with some rare excursions into French. A sociolinguistic study and an overview of political changes that Piedmont underwent from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries are provided, with the purpose of outlining the region’s sociogeographical and historical background which can be seen to have fostered multilingualism in a group of writers. With the support of linguistic studies and philosophical theories on the relation between identity, alterity and language (such as Edwards’s Language and Identity and Bakhtin’s reflections on language), I then elucidate the presence of diverse linguistic varieties in selected narratives by Cesare Pavese, Beppe Fenoglio, Primo Levi, Nanni Balestrini, Fruttero & Lucentini, Benito Mazzi and Younis Tawfik. In other words, my purpose is to explain the reasons for multilingualism in each writer, as well as to underscore the ideological positions which lie behind the linguistic strategies of the authors. With this study I attempt to fill a gap and cast new light on Piedmontese literature. Although some critical studies on the use of dialect or English exist on individual authors and works (e.g. Meddemmem on Fenoglio’s use of English and Beccaria on Pavese’s inclusion of Piedmontese dialect), and some important contributions to the history of Piedmontese literature have appeared in print, to date no current, systematic study that compares different Piedmontese writers under the language/identity theme has been published. The study concludes with a summary of the evolution of plurilingualism in Piedmont and highlights the common trends in the use of multiple linguistic varieties as tools for both social demarcation and an opening up to alternative, marginalised andforeign cultures.

“Love American Style”: Race, Cuban identity and cultural tyranny in Showtime’s Dexter

This article focuses on representation of Cubans in the television series Dexter, paying particular attention to episode 1.5, ―Love American Style‖ with some brief references to other episodes. Assimilation, the American Dream, nationalism and crisis of identity are among the themes and issues that this article investigates. Border theory provides the dominant theoretical framework of the article.