Padma or No Padma : Audience in the Adaptations of Midnight’s Children

It is remarkable that what many consider as Salman Rushdie’s landmark work in fiction, Midnight’s Children, was first adapted to film only in 2012, 31 years after its publication. It was also the first of his works to be filmed. This is noteworthy given the novel’s cinematic self-awareness and the writer’s overt interest in acting and cinema, which he has reiterated over the years. Cinema, as a subject matter and a distinctive artistic language, resurfaces time and again in the pages of Rushdie’s essays, short stories, novels, and other writings. As many critics have pointed out, the writer’s emotional connection to cinema has translated into cinema itself being put to work as a mediating device in his oeuvre, with his characters often making sense of themselves and the world — and coming to terms with their own place in it — through cinema. In this article, we examine the three existing adaptations of Midnight’s Children, with particular emphasis on the 2012 film, in view of their discursively constructed audiences. We consider these adaptations from the point of view of the audience, and how they engage with the spectator/reader. Our analysis is supplemented by Rushdie’s essays on the acts of adaptation and translation from one artistic medium to another. Our purpose is not to measure the failure or success of Rushdie’s and Mehta’s adaptation (although an aesthetic evaluation would indeed be of interest); we argue instead that the film adaptation is a protracted creative project that has taken into consideration, more than previous adaptations of the novel, not only new forms of representation and new ways of reading, but also new ways of engaging its constructed audiences.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Not Quite Right: Representations of Eastern Europeans in ECJ Discourse

Although the increasing responsiveness of the Court of Justice of the European Union (the ‘ECJ’) jurisprudence to western Member States’ concerns regarding Central and Eastern European (‘CEE’) nationals’ mobility has garnered academic attention, ECJ discourse has not been scrutinised for how it approaches the CEE region or CEE movers. Applying postcolonial theory, this article seeks to fill this gap and to explore whether there are any indications that ECJ discourse is in line with the historical western-centric inferiorisation of the CEE region. A critical discourse analysis of a set of ECJ judgments and corresponding Advocate General opinions pertaining to CEE nationals illustrates not only how the ECJ adopts numerous discursive strategies to maintain its authority, but also how it tends to prioritise values of the western Member States, while overlooking interests of CEE movers. Its one-sided approach is further reinforced by referring to irrelevant facts and negative assumptions to create an image of CEE nationals as socially and economically inferior to westerners, as not belonging to the proper EU polity and as not quite deserving of EU law’s protections. By silencing CEE nationals’ voices, while disregarding the background of east/west socio-economic and political power differentials and precariousness experienced by many CEE workers in the west, such racialising discourse normalises ethnicity- and class-based stereotypes. These findings also help to contextualise both EU and western policies targeting CEE movers and evidence of their unequal outcomes in the west, and are in line with today’s nuanced expressions of racisms. By illustrating the ECJ’s role in addressing values pertinent to mobile CEE individuals, this study facilitates a fuller appreciation of the ECJ’s power in shaping and reflecting western-centric EU identity and policies. Engaging with such issues will not only allow us to better appreciate—and question—the ECJ’s legitimacy, but might also facilitate a better understanding of power dynamics within the EU. This study also makes significant theoretical and methodological contributions. It expands (and complicates) the application of postcolonial theory to contemporary intra-EU processes, while illustrating the usefulness of applying critical discourse analysis to exploring differentiation, exclusion, subordination and power within legal language

The Non-Places of Migrant Cinema in Europe

This article focuses on the representation of ‘non-places’ in European migrant cinema. Postcolonial subjects, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are often depicted in non-places such as city outskirts, hotels, detention centres, on the open sea or in airports. Through the analysis of Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort (UK, 2000), Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (UK, 2002), and Mohsen Melliti's Io, l'altro (I, the Other, Italy, 2007), migrants are seen in non-locations, characterised by their disposable bodies and are portrayed against a background of hostile media representations. The article argues that non-places allude to the visual and ideological instability of the notion of Europe, and also to the creation of an alternative space, a possible Third Space, a location of transformation and belonging to an alternative organic society, where new notions of hospitality and tolerance are conveyed