Audio/Vision/Culture: New Perspectives on Turkish German Cinema

Call for Papers: Audio/Vision/Culture – New Perspectives on Turkish German Cinema

In recent years, a lot of activity has taken place in research on the so-called “Turkish German cinema”: the term itself has been deconstructed, historicized, and criticized from both theoretical and political perspectives: Is it a genre or not? Which points of view are excluded by the use of the term? Is the focus on the “Turkish German” still appropriate to the current, rapidly and dynamically changing audiovisual culture in Europe and Germany? And which research perspectives promise new insights compared to the conventional paradigms of analysis?

On the one hand, the planned international conference (May 25^th–27^th, 2023 at the Freie Universität Berlin) would like to gather the current state of research on Turkish German cinema and bring the different approaches into dialogue with each other. On the other hand, our aim is to look ahead and to test constructive approaches beyond old oppositions. We see one such possibility in the notion of audiovisual culture – namely, in an emphasis on the charged interplay of the three components of this formula: in what ways do the visual and the auditory interact to establish cultural contexts? What is gained when we establish the concept of culture audiovisually? What does it mean for film analysis to understand audiovisual stagings as modulations of the cultural? Particularly important for our discussion is a focus on the relationship between (cultural) theory and the analysis of cinematic movement-images. The productive role of concrete acts of film-viewing should be the focus of interest. To this end, we want to combine the lectures and discussions with film-screenings that can serve to challenge established views of Turkish German cinema.

The international conference will be held by the research project “Transcultural, integrative, and racist poetics of audiovisual images” at the CRC Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin (https://www.sfb-affective-societies.de/teilprojekte/C/C06/index.html) in cooperation with bi’bak Berlin (https://bi-bak.de/). Abstracts of 300–500 words in length are requested by February 15^th, 2023 to the following address: turkish.german.cinema@gmail.com.