Women's Studies International Forum 33 (2010) 512–516

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Women's Studies International Forum

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Book reviews

Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, K. Marciniak,A. Imre, A. O'Healy (Eds.), 2007, Palgrave Macmillan, NewYork, ISBN -13: 978 -1403983701, 272 pgs, Price: Hardback$69.95

Transnational Feminism in Film and Media is a ground-breaking essay collection that unites two previously distinctfields of inquiry. Through its examination of feminist andtransnational film texts, this collection stages a confrontationbetween the study of diasporic cinema associated with criticssuch as Hamid Naficy, and the examination of a more generaltransnational feminism pioneered by Inderpal Grewal, CarenKaplan, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Katarzyna Marciniakhas recently joined the ranks of such transnational feministswith herwork on alienhood,while Anikó Imre andÁineO'Healyhave both contributed to the field of transnational film; yet,their new collection goes a step further. This book conceptua-lizes a transnational feminist cinema that does not operate as amere subcategory of feminism or transnationalism, but thatinstead works to reveal the ways in which “transnationalprocesses are inherently gendered, sexualized, and racialized”(pg. 4). In this vein, the book suggests that transnationalfeminism should “take the field of visual media much moreseriously,” recognizing the rhetorical, rather than the merelyrepresentative power of the image (pg. 154).

This interest in what images do, in what new possibilitiesthey create, informs the structure of the collection, threadedthrough each of the three sections that explore women'smigration, circulated bodies, and foreignness. The first sectionfeatures a series of essays that examine the cinematicarticulations of a fundamentally gendered migration. Suchmigration problematizes the national identities of the womenforced to leave a geographical and political space alreadyregarded with ambivalence, as well as complicating the livesof women compelled to remain within a physical space thatreorders and reduces their identities. Asuman Suner directlyconfronts this issue in her contribution, “Cinema withoutFrontiers,” contending that a cinema traditionally conceptu-alized as “national” can still be read as diasporic or “accented,”to use Naficy's term, when it aggressively disrupts the verynotion of nationhood (pg. 55). With this statement, Sunercrucially suggests that the feminist films of these regions aretransnational because they are feminist, because they “inter-rogate the relations of belonging and identity” (pg. 55).

O'Healy explores a more literal version of migration in herown essay, illuminating the ways in which Italian cinema

represents the anxieties and the dangers surrounding themigration and the labor of women from Eastern Europe. Inorder to examine such anxiety, O'Healy and a few of thisvolume's other contributors blend semiotic, psychoanalyticand Deleuzian methodologies with modes of inquiry that areoften considered to be more culturally precise and morehistorically aware. O'Healy relies on thework of LauraMulveyand Teresa de Lauretis to examine the ways in which thefigure of the Eastern European or “Slavic” woman isimmobilized, silenced, and alternately fetishized and abjectedin Italian film (pg. 41). Patricia Pisters draws upon a relatedframework in another chapter of this book, citing HélèneCixous and Gilles Deleuze to argue that the image does notsimply represent reality, but that it “does something inreality” (pg. 76 emphasis Pisters'). Pisters then claims that“the ‘becoming-minoritarian’ of national cinema takes placethrough a ‘becoming-woman’ that can be read firstand foremost in the body of the woman,” conjuring what atfirst might appear to be a rather monolithic female imagethrough which to analyze representations of female resis-tance to a specifically Moroccan patriarchal demand forreproduction.

In both of these cases, the authors perform brilliantreadings of the films they wish to discuss, though theseparticular authors’ choice of methodology may initially seemodd in a volume that aligns itself with the work of staunchcultural theorists like Grewal and Kaplan, this move isactually quite important for a book that is dedicated tobuilding coalitions across cultural divides, especially sinceeach chapter works to historicize and particularize “western”traditions, including semiotic psychoanalysis and Deleuzianphilosophy as two of many historically useful methods bywhich to better understand cinematic images of women.Indeed, Pisters' interest in the image's function is taken up byGinette Verstraete and Ursula Biemann in a later section ofthis collection, where both writers discuss the similar, thoughperhaps more concrete ways in which images “domuchmorethan simply represent migrants; they also produce certainmovements and forms of containment in the act of picturingthem” (pg. 121). Thus, while this collection engages psycho-analytic and Deleuzian methodologies, it also takes care totease out the crucial distinctions between different womenand the media they encounter: “Transnational economicdevelopments and the global flow of information, images, andsounds implicate everyone. But they do not create an equalplaying field…The borders they erase and erect affectdifferent groups differently” (pg. 4).

Following the introduction which sets out these aims,chapter one provides a survey of religious rituals andtraditional commemorative practices in the region beforethe First World War. Bucur emphasizes the cultural hetero-geneity of the lands in question: their manifold religioustraditions and differing historical backgrounds. The failure ofRomanian king Charles I's attempts at modernization andnationalization in the latter part of the nineteenth century isalso emphasised, ‘Mass education was not among his chiefachievements, and many of his subjects, especially the vastmajority of illiterate peasants, remained untouched andunmoved by the spectacle of monarchical glory or militarysuccess[…] as well as other modernizing projects.’ (38).Chapters two, three and four explore the persistence of thesetraditional modes of mourning and commemoration ininterwar Romania. Bucur, expanding the research of JayWinter on the British and French case studies, argues that itwas through these pre-modern traditions that the majority ofordinary Romaniansmade sense of themass death of the FirstWorld War. On the other hand, official attempts to monop-olize, co-ordinate, and nationalize war commemorationenjoyed limited success, their often grandiose commemora-tive projects (including the impressive looking MărăşeştiMausoleum, an illustration of which adorns the book's cover)were not accepted or embraced by ordinary Romanians.

513Book reviews

By examining the functional power of the image intransnational contexts and by highlighting visual culture'simportance to women's studies, this collection situatesitself firmly in the realm of activism as well as academia.Transnational Feminism in Film and Media explores whatimages do to and for women, while also teaching new modesof understanding the act of creating and reading filmic texts.Transnational Feminism in Film and Media would serve as anexcellent addition to any undergraduate film syllabus, witheasily assignable chapters that could be distributed over aseries of weeks. Ultimately, this book should be read andengaged in multiple arenas, and its call to revalue andreexamine visual culture as a fundamental aspect of women'sstudies should be taken seriously.

Lindsay PalmerDepartment of English, University of California at Riverside,

United States

doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2010.03.003

Heroes and victims: Remembering war in twentieth-century Romania, Maria Bucur, (2009) Bloomington andIndianapolis: Indiana University Press, ISBN 978-0-253-22134-6, 353 pp. (paperback)

The relationship between officially-sanctioned and localremembrances of war and the groups which have been (andstill are) included and excluded in such remembrances are thefocus of Maria Bucur's rich new cultural history of Romania.Bucur's key argument is that whilst local commemorativeenterprises and initiatives were typically spontaneous, rootedin traditional rituals and customs about mourning and death,and representative of popular attitudes to war and its memory,their official equivalents were largely impositions from abovewhich were seldom accepted at a popular level. Both local andofficial remembrances have tended to foreground the sacrificeof ethnically Romanian men who were either ‘heroes’ on thebattlefield or tragic ‘victims’ of events and history beyond theircontrol, hence the monograph's title. The ‘masculinisation ofwartime victimization and heroism’ (14) has resulted in anartificially constructed version of events which has marginal-ized and even silenced alternative narratives about war and itscommemoration, especially those of national minorities (Jews,Germans, and Hungarians), and women. Bucur claims that hernational case study is also ‘important to the overall narrative ofmodern Europe.’ (3) This is because, since research into thewarremembrance in Western Europe is voluminous and widelydisseminated, Eastern European narratives are themselves atrisk of being silenced and marginalized. Bucur wishes to‘introduce an example that challenges the dominant narrativesabout meaning and memory of the war dead in both worldwars, constructed primarily around the German and Frenchcases’ (2–3) and thereby contribute to a fuller understanding ofwar and its impact in Europe's twentieth century.

Historians of nationalism in Eastern Europe will be fascinatedand challenged by Bucur's anti-constructivist conclusion thatin interwar Romania, it was the peasant periphery that ledpolitical, national, and cultural elites, rather than the otherway round. Chapter five explores how, in terms of warremembrance, the popular tail continued to wag the elite dog,as it were, after the Second World War. The communistregime in Romania, like its royalist predecessor, was unable toimpose its officially-sanctioned version of the memory ofboth world wars on the nation. Once again, local and privatememories had greater resonance, and the disjuncture was notbetween an official and public communist lie or a subterra-nean and private truth about war. Bucur shows how adialectical relationship existed between an official ‘memory’and a popular ‘counter-memory’, a ‘counter-mythology asflimsy in its evidentiary basis as the [communist] myth they[ordinary Romanians] were contesting’ (205), a sort offairground mirror reflecting a distorted version of theregime's official image of war. Chapter six continues thisexploration of the memory/counter-memory dialectic, andchapter seven explores war memory after the fall ofcommunism.

The book deals with gender relations at length. Gender isemphasised in the example of how male-authored autobio-graphical narratives of the First and Second World Warsdepict the male viewpoint as an ‘all-knowing eye’: auniversalizing gaze which disregards alternative narrativeswhich might compromise the masculinisation of heroism andvictimhood. Women are marginalized too in public ceremo-nies commemorating war, and in public spaces such as theMărăşeşti Mausoleum. Bucur's walk-through of this monu-ment is a mini tour de force of interpretation and analysis,and is exemplary of the author's understanding and com-mand of a wide-range of sources, including national and localmonuments, diaries, novels, poems, films, oral testimonies, aswell as more ‘conventional’ archival finds and official records.