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.

Weathering the crisis? Managing democracy at a national broadcaster

With post-2008 political and economic crises as its backdrop, this inquiry into the political roles and functions of public service broadcasting (PSB) in Ireland is principally concerned with examining the capacities for and actuality of critical and counter-hegemonic professional journalistic and institutional mediations of crisis. Recognising the diversity of influences on the normative identity of Irish PSB, the dissertation adopts a sociological approach that acknowledges the systemic embedding of media institutions in the broader field of power. An initial tracing of the formative impacts of endogenous and exogenous forces on the democratic horizons of PSB suggests that the present crisis conjuncture does not represent promising terrain for engendering critical crisis and recovery imaginaries. A methodologically diverse intra-institutional empirical research agenda aims to explore at close hand Irish PSB’s contingent navigation of crisis, encompassing ethnographic observation in the newsroom, practitioner interviews and textual analysis of broadcast output. These methods afford close analysis of practices of journalistic production and reflexivity, self-conceptions of the journalistic habitus, and ideological affinities of crisis framings in broadcast output. These analyses are supplemented by a participant observation study of the possibilities for public agenda-building in a key institutional venue of public participation in broadcasting governance. The findings offer an evidential basis for the arguments that the crisis has prompted only minimal changes to professional norms and practices of representation and inclusion; that journalistic crisis framings tend toward effecting hegemonic repair by lending support to neoliberal crisis and recovery imaginaries; and that the institutional openings for the building of public counterpower are highly constrained. The overall conclusion is made that the normative democratic orientation embedded in the professional and institutional projects of public service broadcasting help render it ill-equipped to act as a re-democratising countervailing power against the democratic regressions engendered by the present crisis of democratic capitalism.

Territorial development, planning reform and urban governance: the case of Ireland's second-tier cities

The increased emphasis within Europe on the role of second-tier cities has implications for the ways in which these urban centres are considered within national spatial planning strategies. In centralised, monocentric states like Ireland, there has been a general ambivalence towards urban policy for cities outside the capital city, and historically this has prevented the development of a strong, diversified urban hierarchy undermining prospects for balanced regional development. This paper examines the extent to which a new found emphasis on Ireland’s second-tier cities which emerged in the ‘Gateways’ policy of the National Spatial Strategy (NSS, 2002) was matched by subsequent political and administrative commitment to facilitate the development of these urban centres. Following a discussion of the position of second-tier cities in an international context and a brief overview of recent demographic and economic trends, the paper assesses the relative performance of Ireland’s second-tier cities in influencing development trends, highlighting a comprehensive failure to deliver compact urban growth. In this context, the paper then discusses the implications of current development plans for the second-tier cities and proposals for Irish local government reform for securing compact urban development.