Global Film Symposium: Engaging Global Cinema Cultures - Discourses and Disruptions
Engaging Global Cinema Cultures: Discourses and Disruptions
In-person at the University of Texas at Dallas
Keynote Speakers:
Dr. Lúcia Nagib (University of Reading)
Dr. Lalitha Gopalan (University of Texas at Austin)
Special guests include Dr. Iggy Cortez (University of California, Berkeley), Dr. Shekhar Deshpande (Arcadia University), and Dr. Meta Mazaj (University of Pennsylvania).
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 or 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 two-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 and 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 and experimental filmmaking in the global cinema ecosystem
Paradigm shifts in global cinema pedagogy
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Lúcia Nagib, Professor of Film at the University of Reading. Nagib is an internationally recognised specialist in world cinema, cinematic realism, and cinematic intermediality, which she has explored through a novel approach in many publications, including her single-authored books Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (Bloomsbury, 2011). She is an expert in a number of national cinemas, such as Brazilian, Japanese, and German cinemas.
Dr. Lalitha Gopalan, Associate professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and affiliate faculty in the Department of Asian Studies and South Asia Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Gopalan’s research and teaching interests are in the areas of Film Theory, Feminist Film Theory, Contemporary World Cinemas, Indian Cinemas, Genre Films, and Experimental Film and Video. Her essays and books include Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021; Orient Blackswan 2021), Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2002), and Bombay (BFI Modern Classics, 2005), as well as the edited volume The Cinema of India (Wallflower Press, 2010). Her current book project explores various experimental film and video practices in India.
Submission Guidelines:
· We invite individual papers from faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars.
· Please use this link to make your submissions: https://forms.gle/i21w6grrzou9nJfy7
· The submission form requires abstracts of 300-350 words, a bibliography, and a short bio of approximately 100 words.
Timelines:
· Submission Deadline: June 15, 2024
· Notification of Acceptance: July 31, 2024
Contact email: ahtfilmstudies@utdallas.edu
Symposium Organizers, University of Texas at Dallas:
Shilyh Warren, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Film Studies
Mazyar Mahan, Ph.D. Student, Film Studies
Arya Rani, Ph.D. Candidate, Film Studies