MCLC: Cinematic Diasporas--cfp

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: zhang ling <ling1 at uchicago.edu>
Subject: Cinematic Diasporas--cfp
*******************************************

CALL FOR PAPERS

Cinematic Diasporas: New Media Cultures and Experiences

University of Chicago: Department of Cinema and Media Studies
Eighth Annual Graduate Student Conference
Conference Date: April 13-14, 2012

The deadline for abstracts (300-400 words) is JANUARY 15, 2012. Please
email all abstracts with ³Conference Abstract² in the subject heading
to:cinematicdiasporas at gmail.com. Submissions should include a title,
institutional affiliation, and contact information.

Originally referring to the involuntary dispersal of Jewish populations
around the world, the term Odiaspora¹ has over the past three decades been
used to describe an ever-expanding list of geographically displaced
peoples, emigrant groups, exiled citizens, and labor migrants including
those Irish, African, Chinese, Indian, Iranian, and Mexican populations
living outside of their homeland. Along with this, over the past thirty
years scholars have begun to also use the term to describe non-ethnically
defined populations such as queer communities, deaf cultures, political
networks, terrorist groups, and religious factions. Yet while the number
of populations we consider as diasporas grows, the definition of the term
has remained relatively distinct. Beyond the criterion of dispersal,
diasporas are peoples that show concern or orientation for an either real
or imagined homeland. Diasporic populations identify with a particular
homeland, share a collective memory of this ancestral land, and often
dream of returning home. As well, diasporic populations tend to resist
complete assimilation into their adopted cultures, instead preferring to
take up hybrid cultural identities, which exhibit both their cultural ties
to their land of heritage and to their current land of residence.

This conference centers on the question, or rather metaphor, of whether
various new media experiences and cultures can be understood as diasporas
of cinema. In this manner, we wish to push the boundaries of the term
Odiaspora¹ further, so that it may not only be used to describe dispersed
populations, but also to describe dispersed forms of cinema.

Despite the fact that the cinema has from its very inception operated as a
transnational practice, the advent of first analog and then digital
technologies has greatly intensified cinema¹s capacity for international
movement and cross-cultural production, although undoubtedly in
complicated and uneven ways. Therefore, while discussions of new media
have often revolved around the issue of globalization, scholars in a wide
range of disciplines from cinema studies to anthropology to the computer
sciences have produced much work that warns us against approaching new
media from any simple (usually utopian) concept of globalization. In light
of the deficiencies of examining new media from the perspective of
globalization, we are interested in looking at various new media forms as
diasporas of cinema. This is primarily because, unlike the term
globalization, the word diaspora is able to simultaneously signify three
important aspects of many new media forms: their particularly nonuniform
manner of dispersal and usage; their tendency to splinter off into a
seemingly endless variety of national and cultural adaptations; and their
tendency to retain important elements of their Omother-form¹ of cinema.

Much like diasporic populations necessarily transform by adopting the
customs and beliefs of their new countries, we wish to consider how forms
of cinema similarly disperse and transform as they intermingle with new
media technologies and new cultures. For this reason, we hope that
thinking through new media from a diasporic framework will help us to
explore two fundamental components of how cinema is changing in the new
media environment: cinema¹s increasing hybridity in material form and
experiential quality and lack of clear boundaries separating it from other
kinds of media; and cinema¹s increasing amount of (sub-, extra-, trans-)
national forms or cultures and the increasing lack of clarity surrounding
the definition of cinema language and culture.

With this in mind, we invite papers on a wide range of topics pertaining
to issues of the theory, phenomenology, ethnography, and transnational
flow of cinema in the new media environment. These will include, but are
not limited to:

· Theories of new media, vernacular culture and modernity
· Globalization, displacement, inclusion/exclusion, nostalgia and media
· Identity formation and community (gaming, youth, racialized, gendered
and fandom subcultures, etc.)
· Global television and other mass-mediated communities (CNN, BBC, MTV,
Telemundo, Al-Jazeera, Second Life, YouTube, Facebook, World of Warcraft,
Twitter, etc.)
· Sub-, extra- and trans- national diasporic cinemas
· International film markets, festivals, cons, expos and the black market
as sites of inquiry
· Utopic and dystopic visions of media futurity and the
post-cinematic/-racial/-modern
· Performance styles, star systems and auteurs in new media or across
cultures
· Spectatorial practice and reception
· Play, leisure, gaming and media immersion
· Sensorial perception and experience
· Temporality and spatiality, including changes in immediacy, delay, scale
and mobility
· OOld¹ media (the laserdisc, joystick, betamax, floppy disc, etc.),
obsolescence, and its effects
· State intervention and industrial practice, media legislation,
censorship and propaganda
· Role of the archive, particularly in regard to extra- and trans-
national media
· Historical approaches to new media aesthetics, circulation and emerging
technologies

We are proud to announce that our keynote speaker will be Anna Everett,
Professor of Film, Television and New Media Studies and former Chair of
the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California
at Santa Barbara. Her work spans a wide array of topics such as film and
television history and theory, digital media technologies, critical
cinematic reception in the black press, reality television, and race and
videogaming. Professor Everett¹s writings include New Media: Theories and
Practices of Digitextuality (with John T. Caldwell), AfroGEEKS: Beyond the
Digital Divide (with Amber T. Wallace) and ³The Revolution Will Be
Digitized: Afrocentricity and the Digital Public Sphere.² Her most recent
book, Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, won the 2009 American
Library Association¹s Choice Award for outstanding academic book.

Limited financial assistance for travel may be available for international
students.

For more information, contact Mary Adekoya: madekoya at uchicago.edu; and
Nova Smith: nova at uchicago.edu.

Conference Organizers: Mary Adekoya, Nova Smith, Alyson Hrynyk, Shannon
Foskett