Micropolitics of the Migrant Family in Accented Cinema: Love and Creativity in Empire

In "Micropolitics of the Migrant Family in Accented Cinema: Love and Creativity in Empire," Patricia Pisters argues against the Utopian investment in the "creativity of the multitude" that Hardt and Negri attribute to migrants, whom they call "new barbarians" because they can escape all normative powers of Empire, including those institutionalized by the family. She looks at three films that deal with migration Boujad, a Nest in the Heat (Bellabes, 1992-1995), Des Vacances Malgre Tout (Malek Bensmail, 2000), and Mille et un Jours (Mieke Bal et al., 2003). These films demonstrate, Pisters argues, that the "new barbarians" of today are not simply escaping every constraint, and certainly not the family's. By filming precisely the family, the "new barbarians" are creating fabulations and performative "speech acts," that "may help, very modestly and almost imperceptibly, to creatively renew both migrants and settlers." Whereas Hardt and Negri seem to proclaim the revolution of the new barbarian, these films seem to call for a revolutionary becoming of all kind of subjects, marked and enriched by intercultural encounters.