Guest editors: Patrick Noonan (Northwestern University, USA)
& Earl Jackson (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan)
US audiences in the late 1960s found themselves startled
that three low-budget Italian films shot in the deserts of Spain could revive
the dormant Western, unaware that Europe had been producing their own “Cowboy”
films since the early 1900s. The 2011 Busan International Film Festival
showcased Westerns from Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, India, and China. The
dissemination of this mode does not, however, attest to any “universality” of
western values nor a capitulation to a cultural hegemony. Quite the contrary,
such adaptation and localization reveals genre to be not so much a
quasi-Platonic form as a negotiation—a range of signifying practices, a
variable and dynamic template for affective narrative mapping of communal
fantasies and realities.
Cinematic genres are characteristically, perhaps necessarily
porous. While specific genres may share a set of seemingly stable
features,genres are nevertheless ongoing processes that change over time and in
relation to other systems of cultural production. This instability makes genre
an effective category for analyzing cinema as a complex series of negotiations
between the audience and the film, shifting cultural and political contexts,
national ideologies, and economic imperatives. The regions that cinematic genres
traverse are also, much like genres themselves, constructed categories that
articulate relations, demarcate boundaries, and reinforce or disrupt dominant
narratives. The study of genre in Asian cinema thus offers a starting point for
rethinking how cinema reflects, mediates, and reproduces shifting relations
within Asia as well as between Asia and other regions in the world.
Indeed, examining Asian cinematic genres allows us to ask:
how does the transnational production of cinema shape discourses on Asia, and
vice versa? How do cinematic genres represent and shape regional narratives
within Asia—between, for example, East and Central Asia? How do genres
reinforce or disrupt notions of race and ethnicity within national or
transnational contexts? How does the codification and transgression of genre
conventions intersect with discourses on and performances of gender?
For this issue of Concentric, we invite submissions that
take up such questions in critically examining genre in Asian cinema. We also
look forward to receiving articles that seriously engage with genres whose
global modes are already accepted: how does the gangster film function
differently in Hong Kong and Korea, for example? Or the horror film across
South East Asia? And what of the genres that are more culturally embedded such
as the Korean Continental Action Film, or the Telugu-language Devotional? We
envision this issue as a forum for a new Inter-Asian critical polylogue, an
exchange across various regions of situated knowledges and interpretative
engagements.
Please send complete papers of 6,000-10,000 words, 5-8
keywords, and a brief biography to concentric.lit@deps.ntnu.edu.tw by June 30,
2019. Manuscripts should follow the latest edition of the MLA Handbook for
Writers of Research Papers. Except for footnotes, which should be
single-spaced, manuscripts must be double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman.
Please consult our style guide here.
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, indexed in Arts
and Humanities Citation Index, is a peer-reviewed journal published two times
per year by the Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University,
Taipei, Taiwan. Concentric is devoted to offering innovative perspectives on literary
and cultural issues and advancing the transcultural exchange of ideas. While
committed to bringing Asian-based scholarship to the world academic community,
Concentric welcomes original contributions from diverse national and cultural
backgrounds. In each issue of Concentric we publish groups of essays on a
special topic as well as papers on more general issues.
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