PWR 194SM: Cinemas of the Borderlands: Diaspora, Identity, and the Rhetorics of Belonging

While Ousmane Sembène made Black Girl for Africans, French distribution companies responded by purchasing the rights and preventing the film from being commercially screened in Africa. Mira Nair spent two years driving through Uganda and Mississippi before she understood what she was making: not a film about displacement in the abstract, but about the specific moment when two people who have each lost a country recognize what that loss has made of them. In News from Home, Chantal Akerman's mother wrote letters from Brussels to her daughter in New York; Akerman read them in voiceover against the backdrop of the city she had chosen over home, and the film is built from everything she never wrote back. The question each of them was answering before anything else is the question of audiences and how to meet various audiences and still speak to them in meaningful and powerful ways.

The cinema screen has historically been a place where diasporic peoples are rendered invisible, exotic, or pitiable, flattened into stereotype, made to stand in for entire nations, even completely erased. This course examines how filmmakers from diasporic communities return the gaze: crafting nuanced, layered, multiple narratives from the between-spaces of here and there, then and now, transforming the inherited grammars of cinema into something that can meditate on exile, belonging, and transformation all at once.

This is a writing, rhetoric, and speaking course that uses film as its primary text. You do not need a background in film studies to succeed here– you need curiosity, a willingness to look closely, and some experience of living between worlds, whether your own or someone else's. By the end of the quarter you will have developed a set of rhetorical tools for analyzing how meaning is made in visual and cultural texts; practiced writing in multiple genres including close reading, program notes, and autoethnography; and built, collaboratively, an argument about what diasporic cinema is doing and why it matters.

By studying films from South Asian, African, Latinx, Caribbean, East Asian, and Middle Eastern diasporas alongside scholarship in cinema studies and cultural rhetorics, we will explore language and translation as cultural critique; the body as an archive of displacement; nostalgia, memory, and the homeland; intergenerational rupture and repair; and the politics of who gets to tell whose story, in whose language, and for whose eyes. The films we will analyze are not unified by a shared politics or aesthetic. What they share is that they are crafted at the borderlands, to invoke Gloria Anzaldúa, reflecting their hybridized identities and histories in multiple languages and cinematic registers, for local and global audiences alike. 

Sample films we will draw from:

• Black Girl (Ousmane Sembène, Senegal/France)
• The Scent of Green Papaya (Trần Anh Hùng, Vietnam/France)
• Mississippi Masala (Mira Nair, Uganda/USA)
• Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, México)
• Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi, Iran/France)
• Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Japan)
• Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)
• The Farewell (Lulu Wang, China/USA)
• Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, Korea/USA)
• The Namesake (Mira Nair, India/USA)
• Atlantics (Mati Diop, Senegal/France/Belgium)
• My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears/Hanif Kureishi, UK)
• Capernaum (Nadine Labaki, Lebanon)
• The Joy Luck Club (Wayne Wang, China/USA)
• Earth 1947 (Deepa Mehta, India/ Pakistan)
• Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, USA)

ASSIGNMENTS

Assignments are designed to build both analytical rigor and genuine community. They move from close attention to a single object such as a scene, a film, an artifact outward to collaborative and collective work. 

Ongoing The Gaze Journal A running log (written, audio, or visual) of moments in our films where you feel seen, implicated, uncomfortable, or invisible as a viewer. Ungraded and unpolished; this is a space for honest tracking, not crafted analysis. Examples: a voice memo recorded after watching Capernaum about what it felt like to watch a child navigate bureaucratic systems designed to erase him; a written entry tracking every moment in The Farewell where you understood something the grandmother didn't.

Assignment 1 Close Reading: The Scene as Rhetorical Text (1,000 words) 

A focused essay performing a close rhetorical reading of a single scene from one of our course films review, developing an argument about what the scene is doing, how it does it, and what it asks of its viewer. The goal is to demonstrate that formal choices in film are rhetorical choices: that how a scene is shot, cut, scored, and spoken is inseparable from what it means. Examples: an analysis of the mask's final journey in Black Girl– how Sembène frames it, what the camera does when it returns to Dakar, what that return asks the viewer to feel and understand; a reading of the opening animation sequence in Persepolis examining how the shift between drawn and photographic registers makes an argument about the relationship between memory and historical record.

Assignment 2 Curated Screening & Program Notes (400–500 words + live pitch) 

You will invent a film festival and curate one film for it, writing professional program notes and delivering a two-minute live programmer's pitch to the class. Film festivals are rhetorical events, and this assignment asks you to inhabit that curatorial voice: not describing a film, but making an argument for why it matters, for whom, and why right now. Examples: a festival called "Neither Here Nor There" programming El Norte for a Bay Area audience of first-generation college students, with notes arguing that the film's 1983 depiction of the border crossing is not historical artifact but living document; a festival of films about language loss programming Head-On for an audience of second-generation immigrants, with notes exploring how Akin uses Turkish and German not as translation problems but as competing versions of the self.

Assignment 3 The Diasporic Museum (physical artifact + 500 word curatorial statement) 

This course has paid close attention to how objects carry diasporic meaning. This assignment asks you to make such an object rather than analyze one: a physical artifact such as an album, zine, memory box, map, recipe book, letter, organized around a single diasporic theme, memory, or question, accompanied by a curatorial statement that makes the argument explicit. Objects will be displayed in a gallery session where the class moves through them together. Examples: a hand-drawn map of a grandparent's neighborhood in a city that no longer exists as they knew it, annotated with what remains and what has been renamed; a zine assembled from the Instagram accounts of second-generation diaspora communities, organized around the rhetorical question of who the posts are performing for.

Assignment 4 Autoethnographic Reflection (1000-1200 words) 

Drawing from your Gaze Journal, a personal essay that asks where you stand in relation to the screen, and what that position makes visible or obscures. This is not a film review or a personal narrative; it is a rigorous act of self-positioning that uses your own viewing experience as a site of cultural analysis. Examples: an essay tracing what it felt like to watch Monsoon Wedding as a South Asian student whose family does not look like the families on screen, and what that gap reveals about which diasporic experiences get represented and which remain invisible even within diaspora cinema; an essay by a student with no personal connection to any of the diasporas we study, examining what it means to be a sympathetic outsider viewer and what ethical responsibilities that position carries.

Final Project  Diasporic Film Festival (collaborative, groups of 3–4) 

Working in groups, you will assemble a curated program of eight to ten films organized around a theme, question, or community of your choosing with the organizational logic itself functioning as an argument. Your deliverables are a collaboratively authored curatorial introduction of 800–1,000 words, brief entries for each film, and a ten-minute in-class presentation that includes at least one clip. The class will then engage each program critically: what it includes, what it excludes, and what its structure accidentally reveals. Examples: a program of films in which the city is the primary protagonist or antagonist, curated to argue that urban space is never neutral but always already organized around the question of who belongs; a festival of films directed by women from diasporic communities, organized thematically or formally asking what these filmmakers share in terms of how they use the camera, and what that shared formal practice reveals.

This course counts toward the Notation in Cultural Rhetorics offered through the Program in Writing and Rhetoric.