Situations: new special issue on Global Cinema

From: Terri Ginsberg <[email protected]>

Dear friends and colleagues:

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new special issue of  
Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination entitled "Global  
Cinema: Cinéma Engagé or Cinéma Commericiale?"  This special issue  
contains ten essays on modern international films and cinemas,  
including those of Iran, Nigeria, Mexico, Romania, France, China,  
Argentina, and India as well as on contemporary film festivals and on  
films documenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The special issue is available and freely accessible online at: http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/situations/issue/view/58 
  .

The issue has a global reach in its coverage of countries and regions  
of the world ranging from Hollywood’s own “Global Gaze,” to a  
placement of Nigerian Cinema as the equal of Africa’s modernist  
cinema, to Venezuela’s difficult negotiation of a Bolivarian cinema in  
a neoliberal context, to a questioning of the radical othering of  
Eastern European cinema whose concerns now seem much closer to those  
of the West, and, finally, to a tracing of a complex multiperspectival  
fashioning of the image of the Chinese peasantry in a moment when the  
distinction between city and country are rapidly fading.  The global  
reach of the issue extends as well to the range of theoretical  
positions used to examine contemporary global cinema, be it:   
structural-materialist aspects of the questioning of the Israeli- 
Palestinian problematic; the integration of economic and aesthetic  
methodologies in a post-Adornian examination of the Cannes Film  
Festival; feminist and subaltern theory utilized to critique the  
patriarchal aspects of what is sometimes viewed as India’s most  
politically progressive cinema; a rereading and deconstruction of  
French radical workerist post-1968 cinema; and a linking of feminist  
and anti-colonial perspectives to highlight the way that in Iran Abbas  
Kiarostami’s Ten spotlights Muslim women's emancipation.

We hope you will peruse the essays, and look forward to your comments  
and critique.

Regards,
Dennis Broe (Long Island University)
Terri Ginsberg (International Council for Middle East Studies)
Co-editors, Situations special issue on Global Cinema