The Specter of Diaspora: Transnational Citizenship and International Cinema

Abstract

Even as the lack of necessary congruence between national boundaries and cultural identities becomes elsewhere a point of consensus, cultural politics in Francophone North America turn exactly around the concept of a nascent nation-state and how to achieve it. How do popular media intersect with this ongoing process through the textual production of diasporic identities, both abroad and at home? How do such texts help citizenship weave diaspora's figures of internationalism and, at home, transculturalism back into the nationstate? This article addresses these questions by starting from La Florida, a popular Québécois film produced in the United States, to reexamine the figure of a Franco-Québécois community in Florida and how it unsettles the politics of nationalism in its northern adjunct. Citizenship, it is argued, becomes the interface through which regimes of value travel between state and individual, binding individual obligations with affectivities and wrapping together citizens and patriots; this, it is suggested, bears rethinking.