Call for Papers for the Edited Volume: Visualising Criminality: Crime and Films in the Global South

This proposed edited volume, Visualising Criminality: Crime and Films in the Global South, will interrogate the complex relationship between crime, its cinematic representations, and the diverse structural and institutional exigencies behind both across the heterogeneous landscapes of the Global South. In recent times, crime cinema in the Global South has emerged as a vital site of both cultural expression and critique, traversing regional and national boundaries and engaging with communities and their experiential realities shaped by colonial legacies, political-economic conflicts, state violence, wars, and rapid social displacements, among others. Dealing with cinematic productions from regions such as Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, this anthology aims to underscore the ways in which films from these regions not only depict crimes but also, through them, partake in the continuous negotiations of what Rafe McGregor has called ‘power, inequality, and harm’ within the context of the Global South.

As Lynn S. Chancer notes, across the varied issues that occupy social science, it is crime that eludes any ‘one-dimensional’ approach; therefore, scholarship on crime and criminality should promote methods that are ‘simultaneously ra-tionalistically and emotionally attuned’ (130). However, historically, the predominant body of research on crime has been overtly statistical and theory-driven, promoting studies of empirical criminal activities. To address this issue, Nicole Hahn Rafter has envisioned an innovative approach to criminological discourse in her seminal works, Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society (2000) and Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture (2011) (with Michelle Brown). Rafter and Brown’s method lies in bringing traditional criminological theories to films, particularly to Global North films, in an effort that advances not only the understanding of criminological theory but also promotes ‘the role of theory in culture and culture in theory’ (X). On the other hand, Rafe McGregor paves the way in the domain of critical criminology by incorporating literary theories and utilising a deconstructionist methodology as a strategic intervention to simultaneously deconstruct and reconstruct meaning and values centred on crime and criminality.

The significance of the above developments is manifold. First, it shows a discursive shift from a traditional empiricist analysis to the introduction of the cultural and literary turn in the criminology discourse. Nevertheless, such an epistemological shift in understanding crime and criminality tends to secure an occidental approach with films from the Global North as its case studies. Against this background, studying crime films in the Global South has the potential to unpack new understandings of how films take on different hues based on its engagements with local and transnational dimensions of crime—encompassing corruption, gender-based crimes, state crimes, organised violence—while also focusing on the global movements of power, capital, and media that substantially shape and influence the contemporary realities of the Global South. Unlike the Euro-American genre-dominated industry, the study of Global South films can contribute to the expanding Global South scholarship by examining the aesthetics, politics, materiality, reception, and ethics of crime cinema that often transcend categorical demarcations.

In this context, this proposed edited volume will contribute to both film studies and criminology by theorising crime films from the Global South as not mere entertainment but as cultural texts that participate in and mould the formation of cultural imaginaries and the mediation of ethical paradoxes in a landscape with a constant need for decolonial contextualised interventions. This study also reinforces the unique positionality of the Global South with its variegated emotiveness, histories, cultural conventions, and cinematic traditions. The proposed volume is also significant as it aims to study the visualisation of crime on the silver screen, not as mere subtexts or symbolic placeholders. This volume departs from established frameworks of scholarship in popular criminology in two crucial ways. First, it emphasises the specificity of space in the Global South, arguing that the political economies of criminality, the corporeal experience of carcerality, the mechanism of policing, and the means through which communities understand crime and transgressions are all essentially local, though at the same time are architectured by the norms of globalisation. Second, it repositions the crime films from the Global South as more than mere adaptations of the Hollywood or European traditions. Be it the ‘township crime’ dramas of South Africa, ‘ghetto’ films of Nollywood, vigilante and gangster films of India, ‘neo-noir’ crime films from China, yakuza films from Japan, gritty neo-noir crime genre from Taiwan, this volume will explore how crime cinema from the Global South needs a pertinent and necessary intervention owning to its politically imperative and aesthetically distinct corpus that deserve a sustained scholarship of its own. Through an intersectional approach combining film studies and cultural criminology with auteur, legal, postcolonial, reception, area, genre, feminist, affect, and ecocritical studies, this edited volume contributes to and advances the Global South scholarship by serving both as a foundational text as well as a provocation for scholars to think critically about the role of films in shaping, contributing, and influencing the notion of crime and justice by serving as a social critique and a space for negotiating meanings and counter-meanings across both local and global scales.

Within this context, this volume welcomes submissions on crime and films in the Global South. The contributors are encouraged to engage with conceptual frameworks ranging from intersectional theoretical analysis to close textual readings. Suggested topics include (but are not limited to) the followings:

• Gendered crimes in Global South cinema
• Genre, nation and crime films
• Censorship, state and criminality on screen
• Crime films, their reception, and the affective politics
• Green crimes, ecocide, and environmental narratives
• Spectacle and crime in Global South cinema
• Ethnographic storytelling, documentaries, marginal voices, and articulation of violence
• Globalisation and neo-capital narratives in Global South
• Crime, migration, and diasporic representation on screen
• Childhood, crime, and juvenile justice in Global South cinema
• Colonial past, postcolonial amnesia, and the cinematic narratives
• Digital platforms, the infotainment industry, and streaming true-crime narratives
• Criminal underworld, and cinematic representation of law and justice

Editors

• Dr. Ridhima Tewari, Associate Professor (English), Department of Humanities, Economics, Arts and Rural Technologies (HEART), IIT Dharwad, Karnataka, India.
• Mr. Tonmay Das, PhD Scholar, Department of Humanities, Economics, Arts and Rural Technologies (HEART), IIT Dharwad, Karnataka, India.

Submission Guidelines

• Interested contributors are requested to submit their abstracts not exceeding 500 words (excluding references), 5–7 keywords, and a brief bio (100 words) to crimefilmsglobalsouthcfp@gmail.com.**
• Times New Roman, double-spaced, 12
• Chicago Manual of Style

Important Dates

• Abstract Submission Deadline: 30 June 2026
• Notification of Acceptance: 15 August 2026
• Complete details of the full paper submission will be conveyed upon acceptance

Publisher’s Details

We are in contact with a reputed international publisher for the proposed anthology. More details will be conveyed via email.

**Please feel free to reach out to us at the following email address for any queries or information: crimefilmsglobalsouthcfp@gmail.com or at (+91) 9748822321. The aim and scope of this volume is to engage with films that are situated within and beyond the boundaries of South Asia as well. Contributors are therefore also encouraged to engage with films originating from various parts of the Global South.

References

Chancer, Lynn S. “Cultural criminology: A retrospective and prospective review.” Annual Review of Criminology, vol. 7, no. 1, 2024, pp. 129–142. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-081123-084506.

McGregor, Rafe. Literary Theory and Criminology, Routledge, 2024.

Rafter, Nicole Hahn, and Michelle Brown. Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture. New York UP, 2011.

Rafter, Nicole Hahn. Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society. Oxford UP, 2000.