ASLE 2025: Collective Atmospheres, July 8-11, 2025

University of Maryland, College Park

Panel: National Cinemas of Agriculture

This proposed panel at ASLE 2025 seeks proposals that explore ideal of national cinema in the global landscape, with specific emphasis on the cinematic representations of agriculture, rural life, and their connections to (post)colonial and Indigenous foodways.

The construct of national cinema is complex and differentially informed by anthropological, text-based, political, and economic approaches. Perhaps most plainly (if not impressionistically) defined by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, national cinema is understood as “a cinema that expresses something of the soul of the nation that it comes from: the lifestyle, the consciousness, the attitudes” (224). Like the conceit of the public imagination, “national cinema” suggests a universalized recognition of the functions of the nation as they get played out on screen.

But as Adam Lowenstein also writes, there is yet “a structural problem in the very concept of ‘national cinema’ that mirrors dominant narratives of national history” (11). This panel thus seeks to address the development of national cinema through the lens of agriculture, its iconography, and its cultural influence on a nation’s imagined identity on the world stage. Specifically we ask: how do the depictions of agriculture, food crops, and farming practices intersect with nation-making and the cinema as a cultural apparatus? And more broadly, what do such films of the “national cinema” ilk reveal about a nation’s socio-political and economic stakes in upholding the dominant discourses of one national identity over the pluralistic identities of its people?

This panel invites a breadth of interrogations into national cinemas and their representations of agriculture across the globe. We invite proposals that explore films of any national origin and historical period to diversify the panel, with particular interest in (but not limited to) the cinemas of South Asia, East and Southeast Asia, the Maghreb, and other non-Anglophone countries. Please submit proposals of 250 words or fewer, along with a brief bio, to Stacey Baran (sbaran@ucdavis.edu) by December 20, 2024.

Lowenstein, Adam. Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema and the Modern Horror Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Multinational Pest Control: Does American Cinema Still Exist?” Film and Nationalism, edited by Alan Williams. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002.