Calls for submission for an edited volume of academic papers

This call is extended to scholars who specialize in cinema, the media, colonial studies, African, Asian and Latin American specialists, specialists that work on retheorizing race in Europe and the United States, as well as scholars who would be interested in exploring the role and reshaping of revolutionary cinemas since the end of the Second World War.

Interested contributors should email a 300 word proposal to Adeline Koh (amkoh@umich.edu), along with a biographical note, by no later than 30 August 2007.

Book Abstract:

In 1968, Argentinean Filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino first articulated the theory of a “Third Cinema” – a revolutionary genre of cinema that would counter oppression on a global scale. Intended to be a “guerilla cinema” geared at contesting the overwhelming dominance of Western cinema, Solana and Getino distinguished Third Cinema from other forms of cinema, classifying these other types as First Cinema (commercial cinema epitomized by Hollywood) and Second Cinema. “Third Cinema” was supposed to be a liberationary tool – particularly for the bulk of the world that was subject to European imperialism, such as Latin America, Africa and Asia. “Third Cinema” was in effect a medium to educate oppressed peoples across the world using the exciting matrix of an international class struggle, as well as a struggle against imperialism.

This book project intends to return back to the concept of “Third Cinema” and to explore its place, significance and relevance in the contemporary post-Cold War world. It is now a commonplace idea that the world has developed into postmodern societies growing more and more dependent on the media industry and the images churned out by these industries. Even more importantly, transnational media is now thought to form new “imagined communities” past the boundaries of the nation-state. For example, Arjun Appadurai has theorized about how present international diasporic communities now form their identities through transnational “mediascapes” and “ideoscapes” which reach across space and time to create new ways in which identities are perceived, history is written and subjectivities are formed.

In the world where the notion of the cinema – and the Image – has grown ever increasingly important, where then now do the concerns of the original “Third Cinema” stand? What has become to the cinema industry of what has problematically been called the “Third World” – how have cinemas of Africa, Latin and America and Asia developed, how have their concerns, the paradigms and aesthetics which they deal with, and their configurations evolved throughout the years since Solanas and Getino first articulated their call to arms for a revolutionary “Third Cinema”? Where do these cinemas now stand in terms of how they speak out against oppression – and are these cinemas still concerned with the original revolutionary goals as before? How have new types of aesthetics been formed and are being articulated in new African, Latin American and Asian cinemas in these almost forty years since? And how can we find elements of “Third Cinema” now back within European and American films – when Europe especially is no longer “white” – as immigrants from formerly colonized nations now add to the cultural configuration of a “New Europe”?

This book thus seeks papers which are interested in exploring these questions. How can we rethink the concept of “Third Cinema” today – particularly given new genres of cinema that have been developed in the last fifty years? How can, for example, the revolutionary cinema of the Soviet-trained Francophone Ousmane Sembene be understood vis-à-vis the new aesthetics and postmodern concerns of the new South African cinema typified by directors such as Zola Maseko, Ramadan Suleman and Teddy Mattera? How does one understand the development of Chinese cinemas for example, and the concerns of the Fifth Generation vis-à-vis earlier propaganda films? How do these new national cinemas – and their accompanying media industries – reflect the concerns of societies that are struggling with the implications of accelerated modernization – and how are these configured in new genres of aesthetics? Is there still a “Third Cinema” component in contemporary cinemas, and if so, how can it be understood?

This collection of essays aims to be particularly important and useful to practitioners and theorists of cinema, the fields of comparative literature, history and cultural studies. It intends explore issues such as modernism/modernity, questions of colonialism and neo-colonialism and media studies through a revisiting of the concept of Third Cinema.

Frieda Ekotto
Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Francophone Studies
The University of Michigan

Adeline Koh
Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature
The University of Michigan