Abstract
This article excavates a discussion on the mediations that informed the making of the film Aaj Kaal by Asian elders, in a project directed by Avtar Brah and coordinated by Jasbir Panesar with the film trainer Vipin Kumar. It brings this largely unknown and inventive film to the foreground of current developments in participative media research practices. The discussion explores the coming together of the ethnographic imagination and performative pedagogies during the course of an adult education community project centred on South Asian elders making a film. Collaborative dialogic encounters illuminate post-war British front rooms, the seaside and public spheres from what is usually an unlikely vantage point of view in public accounts.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Thynne, L. (2011) ‘Ethics, politics and representation’ in Child of Mine, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 53, Summer, http://www.ejumpcut.org/trialsite/ThynneEthics/text.html, last accessed 21 October 2011.
see http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/edu-factory-journal-issue-1/ accessed 29 November 2011.
This for instance in London (UK) involved The Berwick Street Collective, which produced the well known The Night Cleaners (1975), as well as Circles and Cinema of Women and what then merged into Cinenova in 1991.
Once the participants had decided to make the film public, funding was obtained by Panesar through a small grant from REPLAN/NIACE, to provide English translations and to conduct editing and dubbing. After a consultative meeting with the group members, Panesar and the Milap Day Centre staff, three Asian women were contracted from UMBI Films to carry this work out, including Gurinder Chadha.
In earlier periods when transnational and communication travel was limited for most migrants to letters and telegrams, due to cost and technological developments, audiotapes of bolian were recorded at home among female relatives. These were usually sent as parcels among relatives when weddings and other special occasions could not be attended easily across continents.
Although it has to be said that a report they wrote at the end of the project has enough material in it to pull a book together (see Darkmatter, forthcoming).
References
Axel, B.K. (2001) The Nation's Tortured Body: Violence, Representation and the Formation of a Sikh Diaspora, (Chap. 19) Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Back, L. (2007) The Art of Listening, Oxford: Berg Publishers.
Back, L., Cohen, P. and Keith, M. (1996) Finding the Way Home, Working Paper 1, Issues of Theory and method, Centre for New Ethnicities research, University of East London.
Baumann, G. (1996) Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic, London: Cambridge University Press.
Blum, A. (2003) The Imaginative Structure of the City, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.
Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2006) Home, London: Routledge.
Blunt, A., Gruffudd, P., May, J., Ogborn, M. and Pinder, D. (2003) editors Cultural Geography in Practice, London: Arnold.
Brah, A. (1978) ‘South Asian teenagers in Southall: perceptions of marriage, family, and ethnic identity’ New Community, Vol. V1, No. 3: 197–206.
Brah, A. (1987) ‘Women of South Asian origin in Britain: issues and concerns’ South Asia Research, Vol. 7, No. 1: 39–54, (Re-printed in Braham, P., Rattansi, A. and Skellington, R. (1992) (editors), Racism and Anti-Racism: Inequalities, Opportunities and Policies, Sage).
Brah, A. (1989) ‘Black struggles, equality and education’ Critical Social Policy, Vol. 9, No. 25: 83–89.
Brah, A. (1994) ‘Time, place and others: discourses of ‘race’, nation and ethnicity’ Sociology, Vol. 28, No. 3: 805–813.
Brah, A. (1996) Cartographies of a Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London: Routledge.
Brah, A. (1999) ‘The Scent of Memory: strangers, our own, and others’ Feminist Review, Vol. 61: 4–26.
Brah, A. (2002) ‘Global mobilities, local predicaments: globalisation and the critical imagination’ Feminist Review, Vol. 70: 30–45.
Brah, A. and Hoy, J. (1987) ‘Politics of urban experience: teaching extra-mural courses’ Multicultural Teaching, Vol. 6, No. 1: 22–27.
CARF (1981) Southall: The Birth of a Black Community, London: Institute of Race Relations.
Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Denzin, N. (1993) Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture, London: Sage Publications.
Denzin, N. (1996) Interpretative Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century, London: Sage Publications.
Denzin, N. (2003) Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture, London: Sage Publications.
Evans, M. (2004) Killing Thinking: The Death of the Universities, London: Continuum.
Fraser, N. (1990) ‘Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy’ Social Text, (Duke University Press) Vol. 25, No. 26: 56–80.
Fraser, N. (2007) ‘Transnationalizing the public sphere: on the legitimacy and efficacy of public opinion in a Post-Westphalian World’ Theory Culture & Society, Vol. 24, No. 4: 7–30.
Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Gatenby, B. and Humphries, M. (2000) ‘Feminist participatory action research: methodological and ethical issues’ Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 23, No. 1: 89–105.
Guha, R. (1996) ‘The small voice of history’ in Amin, S. and Chakrabarty, D. (1996) editors, Subaltern Studies, No. 9, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1–12.
Katz, J.S. and Katz, J.M. (1988) ‘Ethics and the perception of ethics in autobiographical film’ in Gross, L., Katz, J.S. and Ruby, J. (1988) editors, Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photography, Film and Television, New York and Oxford: Open University Press, 119–134.
Kaur, R. (2003) ‘Westenders: women, whiteness and sexuality in Southall’ in Andall, J. (2003) editor, Gender and Ethnicity in Contemporary Europe, Oxford: Berg.
Kuhn, A. and McAllister, K. (2006) Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.
Latour, B. (2007) ‘Interview with Bruno Latour: making the ‘Res Public’ by Tomás Sánchez Criado, Ephemera’ Theory & Politics in Organization, Vol. 7, No. 2: 364–371.
Latour, B. and Weibal, P. (2005) editors Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mercer, K. (1988) Black Film, British Cinema, in Mercer, K. (1989) editor, Black Film/British Cinema, Documents 7 British Film Institute Production Special.
Panesar, J. (1990) Unpublished Project Report on Adult Education with the Unemployed in Southall, Project Directed by Avtar Brah, Centre for Extra-Mural Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London. Funded by REPLAN/NIACE.
Passerini, L. (1987) Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Patai, D. (1991) ‘US academics and third world women: is ethical research possible?’ in Gluck, S.B. and Patai, D. (1991) editors, Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, London: Routledge.
Pink, S. (2001) Doing Visual Ethnography, London: Sage Publications.
Portelli, A. (1991) ‘On methodology’ in The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, Albany: State University of New York Press, 27–42.
Portelli, A. (1997) ‘There's always goin’ be a line: history-telling as a multivocal art’ in The Battle of Valle Giulia. Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 24–39.
Puwar, N. (2007) ‘Social cinema scenes’ Space and Culture, Vol. 10, No. 2: 253–270.
Puwar, N. and Sharma, S. (2012) ‘Curating sociology: sociological mutations’ in Puwar, N. and Back, L. (2012) editors, Sociological Review, Special Issue on ‘Live Methods’. Malden, MA: Wiley and Blackwell.
Rathzel, N. and Cohen, P. (2008) ‘Finding the way home: young people's stories of gender, ethnicity, class, and places in Hamburg and London’ Transkulturelle Perspektiven, Vol. 7. V & R Unipress.
Rose, G. (2005) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Interpreting Visual Materials, 2nd edition London: Sage Publications.
Rose, G. (2010) Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, The Public and The Politics of Sentiment, Surrey: Ashgate.
Samuel, R. (1976) ‘Local history and oral history’ History Workshop Journal, No. 1: 191–208.
Southall Black Sisters (1990) Against the Grain: A Celebration of Survival and Struggle, Middlesex, SBS.
Stoller, P. (1997) Sensuous Ethnography, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Willis, P. (2000) The Ethnographic Imagination, Cambridge: Polity.
Filmography
Aaj Kaal (1990) Extra-Mural Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, 20 minutes. To view the film online see: http://darkmatter101.org/site/2011/11/29/aaj-kaal/.
Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) Associate producer Jean-Paul Bourdier, Directed by Trinh T. Minh-ha, 108 minutes.
Night Cleaners (1975) Berwick Street Collective.
Acting our Age (1991) Directed by Gurinder Chadha.
Bhaji on the Beach (1993) Directed by Gurinder Chadha.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the generous time and support provided by both Avtar Brah and Jasbir Panesar during the course of writing this article. Avtar has been a warm sharp mentor and (wise) friend in my life and academic work. I am pleased to have found the time to partake in this celebration hundredth Issue of Feminist Review in her honour and as my last writing ‘act’ before I leave the fold of the Feminist Review Collective into which she very carefully and gently brought me over 10 years ago. Lizzie Thynne and Irene Gedalof have granted this article a close reading and encouraged me to reflect on several dimensions again. Thank you.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Puwar, N. mediations on making Aaj Kaal. Fem Rev 100, 124–141 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2011.70
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2011.70