Call for Publications: "Cinema and Social Conflicts," Zapruder World 6 (2019)

Brian J Griffith Announcement
Subject Fields
Film and Film History, Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, Journalism and Media Studies, Labor History / Studies, Theatre & Performance History / Studies

"Cinema and Social Conflicts," Zapruder World: An International Journal for the History of Social Conflict 6 (2019)

Daniel Fairfax, André Keiji Kunigami, and Luca Peretti, eds.

 

Introduction

Cinema has played a pivotal role in recounting, reinventing, and depicting the world we live in. Most major historical events have been represented in cinema, from the world wars to the fall of the Berlin Wall, while several others have been left invisible in the filmic archive. This issue focuses on the relationship between cinema and social conflicts: revolutions, protests, riots. How does cinema not only describe, but also inscribe and produce social struggles—influencing their present and future? We are interested not only in how cinema represents historical events, such as the Russian Revolution, anti-colonial struggles, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or the 1968 unrests, but we also want to look at cinema as a site of conflict, in different parts of the world: its role in fueling revolutionary consciousness, in mediating spaces of conflicts through performative documentary practices, in strategies of self-representation of organizations, in the disputes over memories of struggles through different archival practices, and in fighting mainstream cinematic representation. We also welcome contributions that address how cinematic practices have expanded into new forms of networked organizing through social media, shaping at once new modes of transnational resistance and of filmmaking.

 

Aims and Objectives

This volume of Zapruder World aims at bringing different perspectives on how cinema has functioned as a means to narrate and consolidate the memory of social conflicts, and as site of dispute, mediation, and production of struggles. Be it in film theory, grassroots guerrilla filmmaking, or transnational networks of alternative distribution and exhibition, cinema not only represents but also produces, imagines, and enables different modes of political struggle. We call for papers that go beyond the analysis of the issue of historical representation, addressing how cinema has contributed to social struggles in any and all intersections of nation, class, sex, and race. We are equally interested in contributions that look at how the history of social conflicts has contributed to the shaping of cinema.

 

Topics and Themes

We invite contributions focusing on any area of the world, which address one or more of the following themes:

  • Cinema and revolutions
  • Cinema and/as anti-colonial struggle
  • Cinema, new media, and networked modes of resistance
  • Guerrilla cinema
  • Cinema and activism
  • Political film theory
  • Cinema and territorial conflict
  • Indigenous cinema
  • Film and labor
  • Cinema, sex, gender, race
  • Cinema and incarceration
  • Politics of distribution and exhibition
  • Film history and the politics of archive
  • Cinema and strikes

In addition to scholarly articles, we invite submissions of non-essay form original work, such as photo essays, videos, interviews, drawings, comics, songs, hyperlinks to online resources, multimedia, etc., both accompanying the articles themselves and as standalone contributions. We encourage authors to think about incorporating multimedia both into their pieces proposed for Zapruder World and in the sections we have created on the journal’s website (e.g. "Yesterday" and "Today").

 

Volume Deadlines & Schedule

Abstracts in English (200-400 words) shall be sent to submissions@zapruderworld.org by February 15, 2019. All contributors will be informed about the status of their abstract submission by March 5, 2016. The full article (6,000-9,000 words) will be expected by June 15, 2018.

For information on Zapruder World’s peer review process or submission instructions, please see the following URLs:

Contact Email
submissions@zapruderworld.org