This article builds on recent scholarship on the European road movie, focusing on Francophone Belgian road films that engage with issues of citizenship and personal, national, and transnational identities. The relationship of these films to the process of identity reformulation within new European parameters is examined, using four films from the past decade as case studies: Eldorado (Bouli Lanners, 2008), L'iceberg (Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy, 2005), Quand la mer monte/When the Sea Rises (Jeanne Moreau and Gilles Porte, 2004), and Les folles aventures de Simon Konianski/Simon Konianski (Micha Wald, 2008). Despite the limited scale of its territory, this article contends that Belgium's complex make-up and status as a post-colonial “melting pot“ provides the ideal laboratory for cinematic identity quests. While anchored in a distinctively Belgian context, these films demonstrate that national boundaries are no longer an adequate container for identities in contemporary Europe. Particular focus is paid to the ways by which each film employs and distorts the traditional road movie template to stage voyages into citizenship.
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Cowboys, Icebergs, and "Outlaws"
The Paradoxes and Possibilities of the Francophone Belgian Road Movie
Michael Gott
Belonging in a New Myanmar
Identity, Law, and Gender in the Anthropology of Contemporary Buddhism
Juliane Schober
practices construct religious, ethnic, national, and gender identity in order to formulate contemporary visions of belonging to a new Myanmar. Taking Foxeus’s (2016) observations about Buddhist formations in their encounters with modernity and print
Imagining Futures of Energy
Views from Central Asia
Markus S. Schulz
sustainable development, and the building of a “competitive” national identity that preserves history and spirituality but is pragmatically open to new knowledge and the challenges of global markets. 6 When the northward move of Kazakhstan’s capital from
Governing Global Aeromobility
Canada and Airport Refugee Claimants in the 1980s
Bret Edwards
Struggle through Choked System,” Globe and Mail , 19 December 1984, M1. 67 National Film Board of Canada, Who Gets In? dir. Barry Greenwald, 1989. 68 Malarek, Haven’s Gate , 74. 69 José Eduardo Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities
Laborers, Migrants, Refugees
Managing Belonging, Bodies, and Mobility in (Post)Colonial Kenya and Tanzania
Hanno Brankamp and Patricia Daley
than on wider solidarities and convivial relationships (see Malkki 1992 ). Research has inadvertently legitimized state policies that seek to strengthen the relationship between national territory and identity, subliminally fueling calls to “root out
Peter Merriman, Georgine Clarsen, and Gijs Mom
articles, one by Panagiotis Zestanakis and the other by Bret Edwards. In his article, “Motorcycling in 1980s Athens: Popularization, Representational Politics, and Social Identities,” Zestanakis examines the rapid expansion of motorcycling in the Greek
Around Abby Day’s Believing in Belonging
Belief and Social Identity in the Modern World
Christopher R. Cotter, Grace Davie, James A. Beckford, Saliha Chattoo, Mia Lövheim, Manuel A. Vásquez, and Abby Day
. The second is shorter and reflects a renewed interest in national identities within the United Kingdom. Abby Day makes a crucial contribution to both topics. In my own efforts to discern and to explain the religious situation in modern Britain (and
Afterword
So What Is the Anthropology of Buddhism About?
David N. Gellner
nationalism, showing that national identities most certainly did exist before Hobsbawm’s ‘age of nationalism’. In all these cases, he argued, the presence of Christianity, and in particular the idea of a chosen people encapsulated in the Old Testament
Autonomous Vehicles and Gender
A Commentary
Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder
of gender and identity developing as some of the most significant. We can understand matters of gender and power by (at least) two vectors: discursive formations in which language use frames experience, and individual performed experiences—ones that
Fashioning Masculinities through Migration
Narratives of Romanian Construction Workers in London
Alexandra Urdea
migrants’ lives.” Transnational studies have for a long time had a gender-neutral approach to men, whose gender identity in the migration process was taken for granted ( K. Datta et al. 2009 , quoted in Souralová and Fialová 2017 ). More recently, studies