[Commlist] Call for Papers: 'Moving Violations: Asian Crime Films'

Call for Papers: Asian Cinema

Special Issue: 'Moving Violations: Asian Crime Films'

Special Issue Editors: Victor Fan, Kristof Van den Troost, and Earl Jackson

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/asian-cinema#call-for-papers 
<https://www.intellectbooks.com/asian-cinema#call-for-papers>

Crime films are about as old as the cinema itself. Eliciting strong 
emotions and affective intensities through the depiction of violence and 
the posing of often deadly ethical dilemmas, they also offer spectators 
opportunities to negotiate their conflicting sociopolitical values and 
address their blissful and traumatic memories. This special issue aims 
to explore the 'moving violations' of Asian crime films.

The term ‘moving violations’ can be interpreted broadly as a reference 
to crime films’ relationship with cinematic movement, action, and 
affection; the way many of these films address questions of social and 
personal mobility, migration, and border-crossing; gender and sexual 
queerness; as well as the relationship between political power and 
criminality (including questions of censorship and governmentality). 
Crime films produced in Asia often address the inter-cultural, 
inter-racial, and inter-regional flows, whose unruliness can challenge 
and violate the Euro-American-centric notion of generic conventions and 
understanding of social and ethical normativity.

Crime seen from the perspectives of both law enforcement and the 
perpetrators cover not only advances in critical analysis but also 
contradictions in the social order as well as variations in resistance 
and desperation from the side of the criminal. One can study how a genre 
functions within a single culture, or how it changes according to the 
cultures that adapt it. By using the frame of the crime film, we aim to 
be as inclusive as possible for all its variations and subcategories.

Essays on Hong Kong and Japanese crime films are welcome, but we are 
also interested in analyses of less familiar and more recent crime film 
phenomena, whether it is Taiwanese ‘black films’ (hei dianying), recent 
South Korean successes, mainland China’s ‘Dongbei’ noir, or the brutal 
poetics of Indian directors Ram Gopal Varma and Anurag Kashyap’s crime 
films. We welcome single-region foci as well as Inter-Asian studies. We 
look forward to approaches from across the disciplines as well as 
experiments in interdisciplinary inquiry, including, but not limited to, 
approaches rooted in cinematic genre studies, cultural criminology, and 
law-and-film studies. In addition, we are open to methodologies 
including theoretical and philosophical investigation, close reading, 
history/historiography and media archaeology.

Submission: Please visit https://www.intellectbooks.com/asian-cinema 
<https://www.intellectbooks.com/asian-cinema> and click ‘submit’. Choose 
‘Moving Violations: Asian Crime Films’ from the special issue menu.

Deadline: 31 December 2026

Inquiries: Professor Victor Fan (ho_lok_victor.fan /at/ kcl.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(ho_lok_victor.fan /at/ kcl.ac.uk)>


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