[Commlist] CFP: Critical Genealogies of Film Education

*Call for Chapter Proposals for an Edited Collection
Working Title: /Governing Genealogies of Film Education/ *

*Editors:*
Hadi Gharabaghi, Drew University
Terri Ginsberg, The American University in Cairo

Contributions are sought for an edited scholarly collection, the purpose 
of which is to introduce readers to a nascent, critical historiographic 
approach to the formal study and deployment of cinema based upon 
extensive archival research into the declassified governing paper trail 
located in government, university, and philanthropic foundation archives 
in the United States and other imperial locations, and of traces left 
behind in postcolonial and neocolonial state institutions. We invite 
research that dovetails investigation of production culture and the 
cinematic public sphere with exposure and analysis of governmental 
policy and bureaucratic processes. The primary objective of the volume 
is to shed light on the institution and institutionalization of film 
and, more broadly, audiovisual education as an international academic 
discipline, as well as of media governance through the governmentality 
of university and state programming at bureaucratic and aesthetic levels 
with complex and lasting implications for global cultures and subject 
positions. The volume’s secondary objective is to assess and reflect in 
this genealogical context on the precarious state of film studies today 
as an academic discipline, and hence on the crisis facing an 
increasingly disposable labor force of film scholars and teachers who 
have come of professional age at the very moment at which the serious 
study of cinematic and disciplinary articulations of race, colonialism, 
and transnationalism has achieved a certain institutional acceptance and 
legitimacy. We especially invite work that unearths previously unvisited 
collections and offers original research and theorization.

  The volume aims to excavate the margins of archival inquiry regarding 
the history of U.S. higher film education, revealing and applying 
findings not previously included in the scholarly literature—or in 
Foucault’s own Eurocentric works—in order to offer an immanent critique 
of the field, its history and discursive structuring, and the practices 
of cultural production in which it has concomitantly engaged—in 
unvarnished collaboration with U.S. and other imperial government 
agencies and with private philanthropic organizations working in close 
relationship with them. The volume will in turn offer an 
interdisciplinary scope that positions the genealogy of film and media 
research into much-needed dialogue with scholarship outside the field 
that historicizes post-WWII liberal education and educational 
institutions within the context of Cold War liberal nationalism and 
capitalist global citizenship. While the volume invites detailed 
genealogical investigation, it is framed theoretically by contemporary 
readings of postcolonial, decolonial, and critical race theories with 
and against poststructuralist theories of epistemology, Marxist theories 
of imperialism, and emerging theories of the archive in order to 
problematize prevailing ways in which the historicization of Cinema 
Studies has been narrativized, its central theoretical paradigms 
maintained, and its socio-cultural practices recognized and understood.

The proposed volume is conceived at a moment during which disciplinary 
interest in the history of Cinema Studies and governing investment in 
film has led to the publication of several scholarly books. It will 
therefore resonate with a range of theoretical methodologies associated 
with the fields of cinema and cultural studies. Furthermore, scholarly 
attention to the role of governments and governing entities in shaping 
the direction of art education domestically and through diplomatic 
policy has had a longer and more prolific history that sheds light on 
the Cold War foundations of higher film education in the U.S. and the 
international arena and its domestic and international functioning as a 
“soft diplomacy.” We are therefore interested in excavating archival 
traces of film diplomacy’s creation of certain labor opportunities, 
academic programming practices, and the growth of film scholarship. 
While we hope to generate a more dynamic dialogue with this evolving 
group of scholarship, our volume intends to address this thematic in a 
methodologically innovative way within contemporary film and media 
studies, making substantive use of archival findings to address critical 
and theoretical claims regarding the genealogies of Cinema Studies both 
domestically and internationally.

A reputable university press has already shown strong interest in this 
collection.
Please submit proposals, including affiliation and curriculum vitae, by 
_October 15, 2020_, to _both_:

Hadi Gharabaghi: (hgharabaghi /at/ drew.edu) <mailto:(hgharabaghi /at/ drew.edu)>
Terri Ginsberg: (terri.ginsberg /at/ aucegypt.edu) 
<mailto:(terri.ginsberg /at/ aucegypt.edu)>


---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------