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