Journal of Chinese Cinemas Special Issue CFP: Before, Besides, and Beyond the Taiwanese New Cinema

Consecrated by European film festivals and cinema studies, the Taiwanese New Cinema represents a rupture between past and present, striking a seeming divide between an agricultural past and “modernity.” The dramatic flair of rupture obscures the rich archive of Taiwan’s cinematic history, which, read in new and even unforeseen ways, allows us to reevaluate and disturb the monumentalism of the New Cinema. How might we look beyond the model of periodization that culminates in the New Cinema? How might this narrative shift if we instead situate film within a broader media ecology, including but not limited to television, art, literature, photography, music, architecture, infrastructure, and advertisement? How might exhibition contexts and histories of circulation and translation outside of art film festivals redraw the broader circuits of Taiwanese cinema? We may ask, perhaps, which films might be able to reframe some of the pet themes of the New Cinema canon: environmentalism, historical memory, urban ennui, modernization, and coming-of-age.

The Journal of Chinese Cinemas invites papers for a special issue that explore what lies outside the historiographic framework of the New Cinema and yet crucial to its formation, definition, and legacy. Our mission is to retrieve the undiscovered, sidelined, and excluded intermedial and transnational cultural market in postwar Taiwan that conditions the infrastructure of the New Cinema and beyond. Abstracts for the issue will be due by September 30th, 2025; decisions will be announced on October 15th, 2025 with an anticipated deadline for full drafts (6,000 and 8,000 words) on January 11th, 2026. Please limit your abstracts to 250-300 words and include a brief author biography with your submission, sent to changmyu@ntu.edu.tw and yslin727@berkeley.edu. If you have any question, please do not hesitate to contact special issue editors Yvonne Lin (University of California, Berkeley) and Chang-Min Yu (National Taiwan University).