A Stranger Everywhere: The écho-monde of Tony Gatlif’s Exiles

This chapter takes forward the resonant body to questions of national borders and bodies constituted in or by the national and social spheres. It brings in the thinking of post-colonial theorist Édouard Glissant and his concept of the écho-monde, a sound-space associated with ‘wombs’ of the ships of the Middle Passage, bringing slaves to Europe. For Glissant, the écho-monde becomes a productive way of imagining a poetics of relation, the various feedbacks that take place across geographic borders, rarefied cultural spheres and fixed identity positions. The chapter argues that Tony Gatlif’s placement of sound and appeal to noise as a migratory event in Exiles (2004) opens cinematic écho-mondes that can express the contaminations, feedbacks and relations that take place between categories and identities. Gatlif loosens the security of the relationship between image and sound to create a world of capacious relations between a sound’s origin and its identity. The audio track neither belongs to Exiles images, nor is it wholly other and so becomes a vessel for the body’s expropriations and the experience of being a ‘stranger everywhere’. This approach expands our sense of the spaces cinema makes palpable and the possibilities the medium offers for the articulation of an exilic identity.