Abstract
In this chapter, I explore the extent to which home in a globalizing era can become a multi-local, cosmopolitan idea constructed through border-crossing conversations and diverse mobilities. For Appiah, contamination functions in an innovatively positive way, and it is such an approach to the culturally amalgamated and palimpsestic mapping of home that I analyze in the interrelated, globe-spanning narratives of Iñárritu’s Babel (2006). This film depicts four family and four part of the world in a way that highlights the extent to which global capitalism instrumentalizes people with less capital, particularly in the Global South.
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Notes
- 1.
This sense of overlapping communities and overlapping perspectives is what Iñárritu refers to in an interview when he claims that “Babel is about the point of view of others” and calls the film “a prism that allows us to see the same reality from different angles” (Gardels 7).
- 2.
Anker also points out that “[w]hereas the tour bus functions as a space of sovereign immunity and enclosure, Santiago’s car undergoes the reverse treatment. It is unduly prone to surveillance, representing an antithetical space of suspended legality that, in this case, elevates the repercussions of otherwise mundane infractions (here, driving under the influence)” (968).
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Bida, A. (2018). Economic Globalization and Home in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel. In: Mapping Home in Contemporary Narratives. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97967-0_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97967-0_12
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