The global nature of cinema has preoccupied scholars at least since André Bazin’s 1940s classification of film history into ‘classical’ (Hollywood films) and ‘modern’ (cinema produced in opposition to Hollywood) periods. With renewed urgency and in the midst of a rise in attention to “multiculturalism” in the 1990s, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam disrupted Eurocentric discourses on cinema, offering instead a polycentric approach to understanding the development of cinema around the globe. More recently, film scholars such as Lúcia Nagib, Stephanie Dennison, Song Hwee Lim, and Dudley Andrew have questioned the negative connotation of world/global cinema in anglophone film scholarship as well as film festival circuits, where the term is used as a replacement for non-Hollywood cinema or foreign art cinema. Twenty-first century approaches to global cinema include Nagib’s understanding of world cinema as a project centered on realism, Patricia White’s proposal to study women’s cinema as world cinema, Hamid Naficy’s study of films made by deterritorialized and displaced postcolonial filmmakers as accented cinema, and Deborah Shaw’s conceptualization of transnational cinema and its various registers. 

 

With these disruptive discourses in mind, we are excited to invite papers for the inaugural biannual international symposium on Global Cinema, titled Engaging Global Cinema Cultures: Discourses and Disruptions. The driving questions of the symposium are: How can we explore the possibilities of studying alternative cartographies and epistemologies in global cinema? How do we understand contemporary spectatorship as interconnected global film cultures? Acknowledging the blurred geopolitical and economical boundaries in global cinema, where do we place the study of national cinemas? How do we reframe film studies curricula to reflect the innumerable possibilities of production, distribution, and exhibition of global cinemas offered by global cinema? What are the harmonies and chasms in transnational filmmaking practices in a glocalized world? 

 

Conference Format: The symposium will be held in-person at the University of Texas at Dallas. We aim to create a network of scholars from around the world to develop theories, conceptual frameworks, and methodologies to reshape the field of global cinema. The symposium is envisioned as a 2-day event that includes two keynote addresses by prominent scholars in the field, a featured panel of invited scholars to reflect on the state of the field, a workshop on syllabus development, and four traditional panels comprised of speakers selected from the open call for papers. The symposium also imagines more informal gatherings to promote collaboration and networking during meals and a reception on the first evening.  

 

We welcome submissions that broadly engage with questions raised by the symposium theme, including but not limited to: 

 

• Global sites of film production, reception, and exhibition: early cinema––present 

• Theorizing World Cinema 

• Decolonizing Film Studies  

• Complicating identity, authenticity, and belonging in global filmmaking practices 

• Conceptual intersections: national, transnational, world, and global cinemas 

• Methods and methodologies in studying and teaching global cinema 

• Interconnected cinema cultures: OTT platforms, film festivals, and classrooms 

• Global Cinema in the archives  

• Global movements, interstices, and global cinema  

• Filmmaking practices of diasporic, exilic, and immigrant communities 

• Nationless cinemas, transnational activism, and transregional audiences 

• Alternative production and reception practices in global cinema  

• Politics of global cinema 

• Avant-garde cinema in global cinema ecosystem  

• Paradigm shifts in global cinema pedagogy