[ecrea] CFP: "Grindhouse: Transcultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond"

Call for Chapters for an Edited Collection:
"Grindhouse: Transcultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond"

Editors: Austin Fisher and Johnny Walker


To walk along New York’s 42nd Street was, from the 1960s to the 1980s,
to undergo a kaleidoscopic encounter with an array of international film
genres. In this the golden age of the “grindhouse” movie theatre,
disparate cinematic cultures rubbed shoulders on the same bills. Long
since celebrated as a melting pot of “cult” cinema, this distribution
model would nevertheless be the cradle for some of the most culturally
visible of contemporary filmic sensibilities. This book looks beneath
the lurid marquees to tell the myriad stories at the heart of this
transcultural process and, by examining these genres in turn,
illuminates them in their national, historical and cultural contexts. By
contextualising commonplace notions of a sleazy underbelly of drug
pushers and peep-shows, it locates the American grindhouse as a site of
cultural blending, in which audiences actively consumed and took
possession of these diverse genres.


The volume's methodological emphasis will be on detailed historical,
cultural and political specificity throughout: firstly, to offer close
contextual readings of the emergence and lifespan of a number of
disparate genres in their own places of origin; and secondly, through a
focus on patterns of distribution and consumption that have subsequently
contributed to these genres’ cultural legacy. The tension between
specialised contextual knowledge on the one hand, and recognition of the
unstable nature of local identities on the other will be interrogated,
negotiated and bridged. The intention is not therefore to position the
USA as an inevitable hub of cinematic consumption. Rather, it is to look
with historically-informed nuance at a cultural moment during which
these genres found themselves being consumed side-by-side, through
detailed explorations of the cultural-political tentacles that led to,
and emanated from, this confluence.


Topics that will likely provide the volume with its key case studies
include, but are not limited to:


1. Grindhouse genres: from pornography to Italian westerns to
Blaxploitation to Chambara to Ozploitation (and beyond).
2. An American porn actor in Italy: Grindhouse “stars”, past and
present.
3. From “Vincent Dawn” to “Clifford Brown”: Non-US directors and their
Americanised personas.
4. Django, Django and Django: Repackaging and retitling.
5. Grindhouse audience studies.
6. Grindhouse theatres.
7. From directors to distribution: the continued influence of grindhouse
on international film and film culture.

A variety of approaches are encouraged, with likely chapters covering
genres' forebears, lifespans or legacies, conception, production,
distribution or consumption.


Abstracts of 300 words should be sent (toaustin.fisher /at/ beds.ac.uk)  AND
(jonathan.walker /at/ ymail.com)  , accompanied by a short author biography
detailing publications and/or research interests and institutional
affiliation, by Friday 20th September 2013.


-----


Austin Fisher is Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of
Bedfordshire and the author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti
Western (IB Tauris, 2011). His main area of expertise concerns popular
Italian cinema's engagement with 1960s and 1970s countercultures, and
his recent research appears in The Italianist and the Blackwell
Companion to Italian Cinema. He is Co-Chair of the SCMS “Transnational
Cinemas” Scholarly Interest Group, and founder of the “Spaghetti Cinema”
festival in Luton, UK.


Johnny Walker has taught film and media studies at the University of
Sunderland and De Montfort University, Leicester. His writing has
appeared in journals such as Horror Studies and the Journal of British
Cinema and Television and he is currently writing Contemporary British
Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society for Edinburgh University
Press.









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