Urban Traffic in/of Contemporary Cinema

deadline for submissions: 
August 31, 2016
full name / name of organization: 
Kirk Boyle, UNC-Asheville Stanley Corkin, Univ of Cincinnati; and Jana Evans Braziel, Miami Univ
contact email: 

EDITED COLLECTION: Urban Traffic in/of Contemporary Cinema

Edited by Kirk Boyle, UNC-Asheville; Stanley J. Corkin, University of Cincinnati; Jana Braziel, Miami University

In the 1990s, geographers began looking at cinematic representations of the city for what they reveal about the relationship between people and place in volumes such as Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle[i] and Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity.[ii] Film scholars soon returned the cultural geographer's gaze from the other direction, submitting their own discipline to a “spatial turn” in order to pose a series of questions about the historicity of the cinema as a spatial medium and culture industry in studies such as The Geography of Cinema (2008). Urban geographers and urban studies cinephiles now share a focus on how the represented city intertwines with the materiality of the city itself. The moving images of film reveal, wittingly and unconsciously, geopolitical transformations to urban space and its denizens.  Fredric Jameson famously engaged this interdisciplinary analysis in his The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System[iii] and then Edward Dimendberg’s Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity.[iv]  As such, film can help us, as Kevin Lynch suggested in the early 1960s, “cognitively map” the city and its related spaces, and to see how certain emphases recur in such mapping. It can also provide us with a means of approach these representations of space with a view toward their temporality, interrogating the historical dimension of their mapping practices.  Such an analytical frame expands upon the core-periphery geographies of the capitalist world system produced by its centripetal and centrifugal dynamics that were central to Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems theory. This collection aims to further this interdisciplinary crossing of film and urban studies, geography and social theory, by examining “urban traffic” in its myriad forms and filmic representations. 

“Urban traffic” provides scholars with a productive thematic for comprehending how cinema registers the mobility of capital and labor through the urban spaces endemic to neoliberal globalization. At the same time, it invites us to interrogate an industry and ideological apparatus that circulates images of cityspace for profit in the global marketplace. The slash between the prepositions “in” and “of” that link the two parts of the collection's title conveys this dialectical tension between “urban traffic” as both metaphor and reality, a tension always already implicit within the relationship between city and cinema. The pieces collected herein, thus, broadly define “traffic” as they interpret cinematic portrayals of narcotics transshipments, human smuggling, automobile congestion on highways and inner city streetscapes, passenger movements through airports, air traffic control, commodity flows through seaports, and movement or stasis in other urban sites. Individual contributors examine minor or third cinemas as well as popular films set in diverse cities across the globe—New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, Port-au-Prince, Lagos, Mumbai, and beyond— that engage, spatially and discursively, multiple forms of urban traffic: legal, extralegal, formal, informal, commercial, migratory, transportational, and architectural.

For this edited collection, we invite papers that examine “urban traffic” in its myriad forms and filmic representations.  Potential topics may include cinematic portrayals of narcotics transhipments, human smuggling, automobile congestion on highways and inner city streetscapes, passenger movements through airports, air traffic control, commodity flows through seaports, or movement or stasis in other urban sites.  “Traffic” may be broadly interpreted: panelists may include cinematic representations of traffic that is legal, extralegal, formal, informal, commercial, migratory, transportational, architectural, and so forth.  Stephen Soderberg’s Traffic (2000) may well be the quintessential film on this theme.  Set in three cities—Tijuana, Cincinnati, and San Diego—and exploring the international trafficking in narcotics from multiple narrative perspectives (drug lord, addict, and DEA agent), Traffic shows both the micro and macro processes of the international trade in illicit substances, as well as revealing the ways in which broader flows of social connection and commerce occur. We encourage papers that further explore this theme in other films.  Alejandro González Iñárritu’s cinematic oeuvre—Amores Perros (2000), Twenty-One Grams (2003), Babel (2006), and Biutiful (2010)—also offers potential fecund ground for theorizing urban traffic in global cities.  Other films also come to mind: Paul Haggis’s Crash (2004), par example, that addresses racial traffic and violence in LA.  We also encourage, however, proposals that address minor or third cinemas as well as popular films in diverse cities across the globe (Nairobi, Port-au-Prince, Mumbai, London, LA, New York, or Boston) and engaging multiple forms of “urban traffic.”

 NOTA BENE: We are seeking a few additional contributions, and particularly ones exploring the issue of urban traffic in films through critical race, gendered and sexualized frameworksSEND QUERIES & ABSTRACTS BY July 31; FULL CHAPTERS BY August 31SEND TO ALL 3 CO-EDITORS: kboyle@unca.edu, corkinsj@uc.edu, brazieje@miamioh.edu 


[i] Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle, edited by Stuart C. Aitken and Leo E. Zonn (Rowman & Littlefield, 1994).

[ii] Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity, edited by Tim Creswell ad Deborah Dixon (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

[iii] Frederic Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Indiana, 1995).

[iv] Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Harvard, 2004).