Call for Papers: SAMLA 97 – Atlanta, GA (Nov 6–8, 2025)
Session ID: 19280
Title: Borderland Cartographies in the Global South: Postcolonial Cinema, Identity, and National Allegories
Session Type: Special
Area: Film Studies / Asian / Asian American Studies

Presiding Officer: Xinyang Li (xinyang.li1@uga.edu)
Deadline for Submissions: July 15, 2025

This panel explores cinematic representations of borderland spaces in the Global South, focusing on how filmmakers use these liminal zones to negotiate identity, memory, and postcolonial nationhood. With a comparative approach, we examine how films from Southeast Asia, Latin America, and other postcolonial regions portray borderlands as sites of myth, trauma, and resistance—spaces where diverse cultural and spiritual traditions intersect.

We are particularly interested in how borderland narratives utilize strategies such as magical realism, hybrid linguistic registers, and mythological reinvention to interrogate colonial histories and national allegories. Drawing on theories of de-territorialization, environmental humanities, geocriticism, and the politics of spatial representation, this panel investigates how cinematic borderlands function as archives of cultural memory, vehicles for political critique, and expressions of Indigenous epistemologies.

We welcome proposals on topics including (but not limited to):

• Borderlands as mythic and spiritual spaces: Indigenous cosmologies, animism, and more-than-human worlds

• Postcolonial resistance and cinematic cartography: re-mapping colonial geographies through symbolic landscapes

• Linguistic hybridity, Geocriticism, and national allegories: code-switching and dialects in postcolonial cinema

• Nature, animism, and modernity: ecological critique and spiritual erosion in borderland narratives

• De-territorialization and identity: exilic subjectivities and transnational crossings

• Myth, religion, and folk beliefs in cinematic storytelling

• Human-animal-nature entanglements and ecological memory

• Comparative studies of Southeast Asian and Latin American films

We invite scholars from film studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, comparative literature, and related fields to submit a 250–300 word abstract and a brief bio by July 15, 2025.

(To proceed, please register an account on the SAMLA website if you haven’t already. Once logged in, navigate to the "Submit a Proposal" section. You should then be able to locate our panel19280 and submit your abstract under it.)

Please inquiries to:
Xinyang Li
Email: xinyang.li1@uga.edu