CFP: Saying Yes to Nope: Cinema, Spectacle, and Race in Jordan Peele’s Nope

Editors: Russell Meeuf, Nancy McGuire Roche, and Eric Gary Anderson

Jordan Peele’s third feature film, Nope, has cemented Peele’s place in contemporary cinema as a visionary auteur concerned with cinema, race, genre, and media spectacle. Building on his work as a writer-director on Get Out and Us, and expanding his oeuvre as a film and television producer across genres, Nope is Peele’s most reflexive work to date, exploring our cultural obsessions with spectacle and media culture’s impact on people of color.     

This collection is seeking contributors to examine Peele’s Nope from a variety of perspectives and theories.

Final essays should be 5000-7500 words.

All perspectives are welcome, and submissions are encouraged in the following areas:

• Contextualizing Nope against Peele’s other works, especially Get Out and Us, but also including his other work as a writer or producer (for example, Candyman, The Twilight Zone, Key & Peele, The Last OG, and others).
• Contextualizing Nope within genre studies and genres such as sci-fi, horror, and the western.
• Contextualizing Nope within film and media studies (Muybridge’s chronophotography, the history of the Hollywood film industry, the TMZ reporter, the sit-com, Osgood Perkins, Agua Dulce as a location for other productions, etc.)
• Critical and/or audience responses to Nope.
• Costume design in Nope, including the use of vintage t-shirts.
• Analyses of Em Haywood, including her possible queer identity.
• Analyses of Ricky “Jupe” Park and Asian American relationships to the West
• Analyses of Angel Torres and Latinx identity in Nope.
• Analyses of Antlers Holst and the figure of the cinematographer, possibly as a stand-in for production culture in Hollywood.
• Analyses of the alien as extraterrestrial, outsider, predator, animal, etc.
• Nope and animal studies
• Nope and disability and embodiment.

Prospective contributors should submit a 350-500 word abstract to rmeeuf@uidaho.edu at their earliest convenience but no later than September 4, 2023. The editors will review submissions as they are received.

Complete drafts of the essays will be due in late January, 2024. We have expressions of interest from multiple publishers.