Madagascan will: cinematic Shakespeares / transnational exchanges

Summary

Conventionally understood as the movement of émigrés across national borders, transnationalism has been described as affecting ‘groups ... no longer occupying discrete spaces or ... cultures’, as prompting individuals to forge ‘relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement’ and as encouraging the creation of ‘geographically dispersed ... migrant communities’. The reverberations accompanying transnationalism are most easily identified in the flows of capital that traverse state parameters, in deterritorialized constructions of space, in the development of hybridized identities, in the determining power of technology and in the simultaneous collapse and reinforcement of local–global associations. Complementary interpretations of transnationalism pursue the phenomenon’s ideological meanings and implications. Commentators are interested in the ways in which transnationalism licenses exchanges and interactions that contribute to the ‘intermingling of cultures’; as Aihwa Ong writes, ‘transnationality ... alludes to the transversal ... the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary ... imagination ... the multiplicity of ... conceptions of culture’. Such transactions are not bound by the physicality of place, since, as a number of observers have pointed up, ‘we attempt’ more and more to comprehend ‘our . . . transnational world’ via ‘symbolic and imaginary geographies’. Transnationalism is a historically specific and economically determined product of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; at the same time, it is indissoluble from a unique aesthetic that might function as a register of collaborative and cross-fertilizing cultural processes.