Border-Crossing the Global Imaginary: The Bubble and Babel

Abstract

The notion that love knows no borders, that it is blind to differences among people, has proved a rich source and resource for melodramatic narratives. Thus, borders and melodrama can often go hand in hand, since that which is endowed with the capacity to separate us also holds the power to connect us. Through their recourse to sentimentality, such stories elicit our sense of egalitarianism, often in the process of wrenching our guts, wantonly pulling at our heartstrings. Stories of lovers swept away by passion, in spite of their different class, racial, ethnic, or national identities, mean to underscore our common humanity. The same is true of those that frame the journeys of families separated by geographic distance whose members must struggle to stay connected to each other or to a place of origin. In such films, we are alternately transported or devastated by endings—sometimes happy, sometimes sad—which either find or shun our common ground. Yet, melodramas about love across borders call attention to the norms and restrictions to which we ascribe and by which we are bound because, while such narratives repudiate the arbitrary nature of boundaries, they inescapably depend on them for their very existence. And thus, at crucial moments of national transition, dramas across borders have actually helped promote and consolidate an emergent national imaginary.1 Love stories, then, despite the cliché, do not tell timeless stories; they always tell of the stories of their time.