The Migrant as an Eye/I. Transculturality, self-representation, audiovisual practices

Abstract

Experiences such as those of exile, immigration, and transnationality are central in the current political and cultural debate. Several filmic works and visual artistic projects focus their narratives on life stories, as shaped by distance (either geographic or memory-related) and motion (in terms of travel, border crossing and disorientation). Meanwhile, a focus on exilic and diasporic identities may lead potential audience to perceive migrant works merely on the basis of personal traumas of displacement. This special issue of Cinergie aims at scoping the plurality of cross-media productions that define nondominant forms of ethnic subjectivity, in the awareness of both the dynamic contamination of cultural models and the crisis of the ancient dichotomy between Self and Other. How could thus ex-/post-colonial subjects and their antecedents/descendants represent their selves, tell their own stories and subverting the stereotypes of Western culture? How are hierarchies re-inscribed when the Other\u2019s self-image is re-mediated in the Western media system? When and how does the Other actually have the possibility to really represent her/himself? In this age of highest expansion of new autobiographical forms made possible thanks to audiovisual and digital practices (autobiographical fiction and documentary films and videos, digital storytelling platforms, self-portraits and selfies, Vlog, Facebook and Instagram accounts, etc.), it is not only possible for anyone to produce and circulate self-representations as a banal and everyday practice, but it allows for current selfrepresentations to challenge established discourses that reflect power relations at both social and geopolitical level