CfP: Edited Volume: ON NON-ANGLOPHONE EUROPEAN SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA
Edited by Antonio Córdoba (Manhattan College)
This edited volume will analyze how science fiction
tropes are used used by non-Anglophone European filmmakers to explore
national and global issues. As part of an increasingly productive scholarly
appreciation of the ways in which speculative aesthetics help us understand our
present and envision possible futures, this volume wants to ask a number of
intriguing and valuable questions: How do the science fiction films from these
societies tackle a wide range of modern and contemporary topics, from the
actual possibility of human-made planetary apocalypse to the tension and global
competiton of the Cold War, the neoliberal revolution, outer space exploration,
globalization, new discourses on race, gender and sexualities, formulation of
new transhumanist and posthumanist identities in the face of new technological
and environmental discourses, global climate change in the Anthropocene, etc.?
Authors are invited but not required to take into
consideration the two-faced character of non-Anglophone European science
fiction cinema. On the one hand, non-Anglophone science fiction cinema occupies
a marginal place in regard to Anglophone productions in the eyes of the
mainstream structures of cultural consumption and evaluation. Budget
limitations and/or language barriers prevent those films from circulating
globally with the same ease as Hollywood productions and Anglophone independent
productions (such as relatively small-budget British films as 28 Days
Later or Under the Skin). As a result, it is more
difficult for non-Anglophone science fiction films to enter a canon dominated
by Anglophone productions. Even when they are acknowledged as part of a world
canon of science fiction cinema, such obvious examples as Godard’s Alphaville,
Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker, Marker’s La
Jetée or Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen and The City
of Lost Children are still on the margins. This neglect obscures and
even erases specific and alternative national articulations of the science
fiction genre. On the other hand, these films are still European films, which
means they come from wealthy societies with all the cultural prestige, actual
political power and imperialist past of the metropolis (and, in the case of France
and Russia, even the nuclear capability to participate in an apocalyptic event
of planetary destruction). Moreover, while these European countries may have a
complicated or oblique relationship to the materialities and technological
myths behind much of Anglophone science fiction, that relationship is different
from the way in which authors in the Global South see, for better or worse,
their relationship to metropolitan/canonical science fiction.
This volume invites but not requires authors to explore European
science fiction films along these terms of exclusion / inclusion and
marginalization / hegemonic global presence. While there is the risk of
centering Europe, once again, in a global field of cultural production, this
collection will try to de-center (non-Anglophone) Europe and understand
better its ambivalent place in global science fiction.
Potential topics include but are not limited to:
- European films produced in any non-Anglophone European country or national culture.
- Appropriation and transformation of tropes and conventions associated to Anglophone cinema.
- Utopian and dystopian cinema.
- Science fiction cinema and gender.
- Science fiction cinema, queer futurities, and LGBTQ+ identities.
- Posthumanism, transhumanism, non-human subjectivities.
- Prefigurations of the End.
- Migration.
- Science fiction cinema and the Anthropocene.
- Western and Eastern European imaginations of interplanetary exploration.
Please send a 300-word abstract and a short bio to Antonio
Cordoba by May 15, 2023. Final essays should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words
long and will be due on January 15, 2024. Do not hesitate to contact me if you
have any questions.
Contact Info:
Antonio Cordoba, Manhattan College
URL: https://manhattan.edu/campus-directory/antonio.cordoba