Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Introduction
- Part 1a Mapping Cinematic Journeys: Chronotopes of Journeys
- 1 Global Visions: Around-the-World Travel and Visual Culture in Early Modernity
- 2 Brief Encounters: The Railway Station on Film
- 3 Diasporic Dreams and Shattered Desires: Displacement, Identity and Tradition in Heaven on Earth
- 4 Chronotopic Ghosts and Quiet Men: José Luis Guerín’s Innisfree
- 5 Memories, Notebooks, Roads: The Essayistic Journey in Time and Space
- Part 1b Expanding Europe: Interstitial Production and Border-crossing in Eastern European Cinema
- 6 Shadows of Unforgotten Ancestors: Representations of Estonian Mass Deportations of the 1940s in In the Crosswind and Body Memory
- 7 The Holocaust and the Cinematic Landscapes of Postmemory in Lithuania, Hungary and Ukraine
- 8 Hesitant Journeys: Fugitive and Migrant Narratives in the New Romanian Cinema
- 9 Women on the Road: Representing Female Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian–Romanian Co-productions
- Part 2a Form and Narrative in Journey Genres
- 10 The Sense of an Ending: Music, Time and Romance in Before Sunrise
- 11 Moving in Circles: Kinetic Elite and Kinetic Proletariat in ‘End of the World’ Films
- 12 Gothic Journeys: Travel and Transportation in the Films of Terence Fisher
- 13 Transnational Productions and Regional Funding: Bordercrossing, European Locations and the Case of Contemporary Horror
- Part 2b The Politics of the Road Movie
- 14 Colonialism in Latin American Road Movies
- 15 Spaces of Failure: The Gendering of Neoliberal Mobilities in the US Indie Road Movie
- 16 Sic transit: The Serial Killer Road Movie
- Index
3 - Diasporic Dreams and Shattered Desires: Displacement, Identity and Tradition in Heaven on Earth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Introduction
- Part 1a Mapping Cinematic Journeys: Chronotopes of Journeys
- 1 Global Visions: Around-the-World Travel and Visual Culture in Early Modernity
- 2 Brief Encounters: The Railway Station on Film
- 3 Diasporic Dreams and Shattered Desires: Displacement, Identity and Tradition in Heaven on Earth
- 4 Chronotopic Ghosts and Quiet Men: José Luis Guerín’s Innisfree
- 5 Memories, Notebooks, Roads: The Essayistic Journey in Time and Space
- Part 1b Expanding Europe: Interstitial Production and Border-crossing in Eastern European Cinema
- 6 Shadows of Unforgotten Ancestors: Representations of Estonian Mass Deportations of the 1940s in In the Crosswind and Body Memory
- 7 The Holocaust and the Cinematic Landscapes of Postmemory in Lithuania, Hungary and Ukraine
- 8 Hesitant Journeys: Fugitive and Migrant Narratives in the New Romanian Cinema
- 9 Women on the Road: Representing Female Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian–Romanian Co-productions
- Part 2a Form and Narrative in Journey Genres
- 10 The Sense of an Ending: Music, Time and Romance in Before Sunrise
- 11 Moving in Circles: Kinetic Elite and Kinetic Proletariat in ‘End of the World’ Films
- 12 Gothic Journeys: Travel and Transportation in the Films of Terence Fisher
- 13 Transnational Productions and Regional Funding: Bordercrossing, European Locations and the Case of Contemporary Horror
- Part 2b The Politics of the Road Movie
- 14 Colonialism in Latin American Road Movies
- 15 Spaces of Failure: The Gendering of Neoliberal Mobilities in the US Indie Road Movie
- 16 Sic transit: The Serial Killer Road Movie
- Index
Summary
This chapter addresses the question of travel through the analysis of Deepa Mehta's 2008 film Heaven on Earth. Through the narration of the journey of a young Punjabi bride from India to Canada, the film provides a critical analysis of the concept of diaspora which on the one hand emphasises the difference between ‘casual travels’ and diasporic journeys (Brah 1996: 182), and on the other focuses on the political, economic and cultural conditions within which people move, as well as their positions in terms of gender, race and ethnicity.
‘At the heart of the notion of diaspora,’ observes Avtar Brah, ‘is the image of a journey’ (1996: 182). Indeed, as the literal meaning of the term diaspora points to the dispersal from an original homeland (Desai 2004: 18; Tölölyan 2007: 648), it would be impossible to imagine a static diaspora. Images of journeys abound in cinematic representations of the Indian diaspora, be they the ones offered by Indian popular films or by Western-based South Asian filmmakers. And yet, if all diasporas entail travelling, not all forms of travelling qualify as diasporas. Embedded in the notion of diaspora is ‘a sense of uprootedness, disconnection, loss and estrangement’ (Cohen 2008: 174), the problematic of identity and the related instability of questions of home and belonging (Brah 1996: 190–5; Mishra 2007: 2; Tsagarousianou 2004: 56–60; Williams 1999). Moreover, unlike ‘casual travels’, diasporas are thought of, analysed and narrated as communities characterised by the specificity of the circumstances which prompted their movement away from their homeland. However, even though diasporic communities share some internal characteristics, they are not monolithic, homogeneous social formations. On the contrary, as Brah observes, diasporas are ‘contested spaces, even as they are implicated in the construction of a common “we”’ (1996: 184). As a consequence, the scholar argues, in the analysis of diasporas we should remain ‘attentive to the nature and type of processes in and through which the collective “we” is constituted. Who is empowered and who is disempowered in the specific construction of the “we”?’ (1996: 184; see also Hall 1993: 235). This is a question openly addressed by Deepa Mehta in Heaven on Earth.
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- Information
- Journeys on ScreenTheory, Ethics, Aesthetics, pp. 50 - 69Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018