Transculturation in German and Spanish Migrant and Diasporic Cinema: On Constrained Spaces and Minor Intimacies in Princesses and A Little Bit of Freedom

Abstract

German film critic Georg Seeßlen (2000) claims that, since the 1990s, European films about migration and multiculturalism have adopted a new perspective. In Germany, he notes, directors such as Fatih Akin, Thomas Arslan, Kutluğ Ataman, Ayşe Polat and Yüksel Yavuz have developed a ‘cinema of two cultures’, emphasising the ordinariness of multiculturalism and hybrid identities. Seeßlen interprets Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘hybridity’ as ‘cultural mixing’ and ‘living between cultures’. For Bhabha, however, hybridity is not just about the fusion of cultures. Rather it represents continuous and discontinuous processes of identification, dis-identification and re-identification, a ‘Third Space’, which questions and transforms national identity (Bhabha 1994: 38). This perspective resonates with the concept of transculturation developed by Cuban theorist Fernando Ortiz. Unlike Bhabha, Ortiz foregrounds the material conditions which produce and influence cultural contact and transformation; he concentrates on the habitation of ‘social spaces where people are coerced to labor and live’ (Coronil 1995: xv).