[Commlist] Call for submissions for special issue of Northern Lights: ‘Europe at the crossroads: Cinematic takes’.

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Northern Lights: Film and Media 
Studies Yearbook

Click here for more information >> 
https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/MediaManager/File/NL/Northern%20Lights%20(CFP)Europe%20at%20the%20Crossroads-%20Cinematic%20Takes.pdf

Guest editor: Temenuga Trifonova, Associate Professor of Cinema and 
Media Studies, York University, Toronto

Europe at the Crossroads: Cinematic Takes The history of the idea of 
‘European identity’ can be described in terms of, on one hand, a 
constant oscillation between two poles, one instrumental or pragmatic 
(the Europe of norms), the other affective (the Europe of values and 
feelings) and, on the other hand, in terms of a continuous, unresolved 
conflict between the belief in some ineffable European ‘spirit’ or 
‘ethos’ and the outright rejection of any sort of ‘European identity’. 
Indeed, a recurring theme in all critical writings on Europe and 
European identity is the idea that to be European is to doubt that there 
is something like a ‘European identity’. To illuminate the ambiguity 
pervading attempts to define European identity one need only juxtapose 
the traditional characteristics of Europeanness deriving from the 
continent’s founding philosophical and religious traditions, including 
Christianity, Roman law and the Enlightenment – here ‘Europeanness’ is 
defined in relation to the concepts of the polis, citizenship, democracy 
and participation, rationalism, universality and cosmopolitanism – with 
the immense contradictions underlying the concept of Europeanness 
defined in relation to political and economic circumstances.

Over the last couple of decades, Europe has seen a trend of populist 
right-wing parties riding on the wave of multicultural backlash across 
Europe, gaining widespread support with xenophobic nationalist-populist 
slogans purporting to save ethno-nationalist culture from the threat of 
immigrants. The Brexit referendum, following a prolonged political 
campaign of heightened anxiety over border control, was simply the most 
dramatic expression of the crisis of democracy Europe is facing. The 
sweeping territorial recalibration following the establishment of the EU 
has led many scholars to declare the emergence of a post-national 
European identity and citizenship based on mobility and universal human 
rights rather than on the rights of persons as members of nationstates. 
In Tracking Europe: Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics of Location 
(2010) Ginette Verstraette claims that the notion of ‘imagined mobility’ 
has become more essential to the notion of European identity than 
Benedict Anderson’s influential idea of ‘imagined community’, which is 
still territorial in nature. However, while it might seem that we have 
entered a post-national age marked by identities that are provisional, 
fluid, incoherent and ephemeral, the nation state has not lost any of 
its relevance or authority: regardless of the supposed dissolution of 
borders under globalization, modern citizenship still embeds identity 
and legal rights in the territorial nation-state.

The purpose of this special issue of Northern Lights: Film and Media 
Studies Yearbook is to reflect on contemporary debates around the 
concepts of ‘Europe’ and ‘European identity’ through an examination of 
European films from 2000 to the present dealing with various aspects of 
globalization (the refugee crisis, labour migration, the resurgence of 
nationalism and ethnic violence, neoliberalism, transnational 
commodification, post-colonialism, transnational capital etc.) with a 
particular attention to the ambiguities and contradictory aspects of the 
figure of the migrant and the ways in which this figure challenges us to 
rethink European identity and its core Enlightenment values 
(citizenship, justice, ethics, liberty, tolerance, and hospitality). 
Migrants and refugees have become, in Rey Chow’s words, ‘the new 
“primitives” of Europe’. On the other hand, however, the migrant/refugee 
has also been celebrated as a 1) symbol of ‘nomadic excess’; 2) the 
‘structural excess’ constitutive of law and morality; 3) a utopian 
figure representing a model for rethinking the idea of ‘Europe’ and of 
‘European identity’.

Please send a 300-word proposal and a short bio to the editor, Temenuga 
Trifonova, at (temenuga /at/ yorku.ca) <mailto:(temenuga /at/ yorku.ca)> by 15 
February 2019. Final papers will be due 15 August 2019.
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