Migration, Mobility, and Sojourning in Cross-cultural Films: Interculturing Cinema

(Hardback)

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Migration, Mobility and Sojourning in Cross-cultural Films: Interculturing Cinema draws on existing scholarship on global movements and intercultural communication in cinema to analyze six cross-cultural films. Ishani Mukherjee and Maggie Griffith Williams locate key themes that tie into the complexity and implications of global movements, including migrants experiences of culture-shock, cultural assimilation and/or integration, cultural identities in transition, social mobility and movements, and the short-term intercultural impact that sojourners experience in unfamiliar cultural space. Mukherjee and Williams explore how intercultural communication functions in the storytelling and in the formation of character relationships in these films, arguing that the depictions of migration, mobility, and the resulting intercultural communications are complex and stressful moments of conflict that lead to mixed results. Scholars of film studies, communication, migrant studies, sociology, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

Reviews

Analyzing popular motion pictures with depth and care, Ishani Mukherjee and Maggie Griffith Williams move between different national cinemas to highlight films that can be helpful in fostering intercultural communication. In Migration, Mobility, and Sojourning in Cross-Cultural Films: Interculturing Cinema, Mukherjee and Williams offer sharp case studies that demonstrate how people's mobility today is impacted by racism, the immigration industrial complex, multinational capitalism, and settler colonialism. In bringing together these various narratives and scales of people's movement in space, embodiment, and feeling, they provide a guide for how scholars, teachers, students, and viewers can use film to better understand intercultural communication, and recognize its integrality to a greater and more just society.

--Meenasarani Linde Murugan, Fordham University

By examining diverse 21st-century cross-cultural films, the authors place a much needed analysis on the global complexities reflected in cultural products. Their attention to mobility, adaptation, identity, migration, and globalization in film, while bringing in intercultural communication concepts and theories, makes this book is a must-have for any educator and scholar of media studies and intercultural communication! It is an excellent teaching book on many well-known and well-regarded films that will appeal to readers globally.

--Diem-My Bui, University of Illinois at Chicago

Ishani Mukherjee and Maggie Griffith Williams have put together a set of analyses that connect film and intercultural communication. Through a careful and close discussion of particular texts portraying contexts of complex intercultural learning and growth, the authors have provided us with a text that can be engaged within academic contexts in the classroom (both undergraduate and graduate) as well as outside of academia. This is a much-needed bridging of cultural studies, mobilities, and migration-based reading of film as applicable to the practical everydayness of the field of intercultural communication. Writing in a manner that is accessible yet theoretically nuanced is not easy - but the authors of this book have achieved the balance.

--Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State University

Author Bio

Ishani Mukherjee is clinical assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Maggie Griffith Williams is postdoctoral teaching associate at Northeastern University and visiting scholar at Fordham University.