Introduction: Global Migrant Media

A few years ago, as I was working on a book about film history from the silent era to mid-century, it struck me that everything I was writing about refused to sit still. The films, of course, were simply irrepressible, crossing enormous spaces and borders with such abandon that it seemed as though the physical movement of film canisters—by train, steamship, and bicycle—constituted a more vital feature of the medium than the fundamental fact that motion pictures portrayed pictures in motion. Film censorship quickly emerged as a kind of border patrol or carceral apparatus, with many censors themselves appearing confused as to whether motion pictures were animate beings. They spoke ominously of waves of movement and created networks of informants to keep vigil against imminent invasions of their territories. One 1920s censor wrote with typical apprehension about an unlicensed film's screening, warning a colleague that "the film has been turned loose in Virginia without any recognition of our authority" (Jackson 2017, 258). Motion pictures didn't just flicker across the screen; they literally traveled through time and space, and nothing, in the end, could stop them. I traveled, too, spending more than a decade trying to find them—by automobile, airplane, subway, and when necessary, by internet—and these research trips revealed to me in a concrete way just how mobile the film medium had always been.

Meanwhile, it seemed to me, the people themselves were just as mobile. I had taken up the study of the US South, but so many millions of people were coming and going to and from the region that I began to doubt such a place actually existed in any meaningful way. It was one thing for a wealthy landowner, worried about his dwindling labor force, to lament "the restless tide of humanity which is rushing toward the cities like flocks of fireflies" (Jackson 2017, 18). This, after all, was a familiar story of the modern South, as legible as a pull-down elementary school map with an enormous red arrow pointing due north to signify the outmigration of its impoverished, restless, ambitious hordes in search of employment, citizenship rights, and dignity. But when the story is told by way of a medium this mobile—this contemptuous not just of political geography but also of shooting locations, filmmakers' origins, and the deep histories of places like Manteo, Cumberland, Vicksburg, Atlanta, New Iberia, and Mound Bayou—it becomes difficult to believe anything like "the South" matters anymore. Even as the US South had become a transferable commodity in itself, its authenticity avowed by the likes of D. W. Griffith and David O. Selznick—beware the coma-inducing consensus of empire-builders from different parts of the world!—millions of others had different ideas about its fixity, creating far more complex and ambiguous patterns and networks and deriving their own identities not as Heideggerian trees rooted in the soil but as dynamic beings with eyes for the horizon who moved, sometimes eagerly, sometimes grudgingly, and then moved again.

At some point, too, these migration patterns—for there were many, not just one—transcended US geography and became a global story. Some of my southerners went to Europe, to Latin America, to Africa and Asia, just as people and forces from the far reaches of the world contributed to what I had come to call the "southern cinema." And I began to wonder about the migrations of southerners as part of a world film and media history, and how international migration as a force in world affairs has shaped the history of the medium. If every medium created by people has an anthropomorphic dimension, I imagined, perhaps this inexorable mobility has carried over from human to medium, not just in a single film's sojourn in a classical-era road show or latter-day streaming platform, but in these major patterns of cultural identity formation; engagement with the broad international structures of politics, economics, and law; and the complex, even contradictory, impulse to aspire to know the whole world even while acknowledging the necessity of limits according to the local, the regional, the...