[ecrea] CFP - Reinventing Mao: Maoisms and National Cinemas

Call for Essays
Cinéma & Cie. International Film Studies Journal
Special Issue no. 30

EXTENDED DEALINE: JULY 16, 2017

Reinventing Mao
Maoisms and National Cinemas

Edited by Marco Dalla Gassa, Corrado Neri, Federico Zecca

Deadline for abstract proposal: July 3, 2017


The charismatic and controversial figure of Mao Zedong has not only left 
a deep mark on the history of twentieth-century China – looming over the 
country’s new capitalist developments, as a sort of ghost – but he has 
also remarkably spread beyond national borders and into completely 
different political and social contexts. In particular, after the start 
of the Cultural Revolution (1966), several groups inspired by Chinese 
Marxism-Leninism appeared worldwide. From the United States to India, 
from New Zealand to Peru, from Indonesia to Japan and within the main 
European countries, specific political ideals, revolutionary 
propositions, fantasies and images of purity, as well as a Third World 
perspective have been projected onto the figure of Mao, to some extent 
giving way to a form of idolatry – so called maolâtrie. More generally, 
at a trans-national level, Maoism has stood an umbrella term for 
different desires and intellectual and affective investments, according 
to their own cultural and geo-political contexts. As a cultural 
phenomenon, in fact, Maoism represents the ideal place where everyone 
has been able to invest what they wanted. In other words, each country 
has developed and, so to speak, re-invented “its own” Maoism with 
specific characteristics, often completely different from the Chinese 
original.

Starting from these premises, this special issue of Cinéma & Cie aims to 
investigate the relationship between national cinemas and trans-national 
Maoism(s), with a particular focus on the ways in which cinema and its 
(critical, theoretical, social) discourses have contributed to 
re-writing (and re-inscribing) Chinese Maoism within different national 
cultures. In order to reach this goal, this special issue asks scholars 
to pay less attention to the more ideological and militant aspects of 
the relation between cinema and Maoism (already widely studied in the 
past) and to focus instead on more up-to-date theoretical approaches and 
methodologies, taking into account: audience reception practices (for 
instance, the impact of given films in specific social and cultural 
contexts); film critic and cinephilia (also in activist, not only film, 
magazines); the iconographic relevance of specific images (for instance, 
the successful circulation of the figure of Mao within the collective 
imagination at an international level); the penetration of Maoist 
watchwords within specific film practices including both genre and 
auteur, as well as the avant-garde. We invite contributions (both case 
studies and theoretical reflections) on:

Theories

-       The impact of Maoist thought on film and visual art theories.
-       The relation between Maoism and other theoretical fascinations 
of the time: structuralism, psychoanalysis, and semiology.
-       Film philosophy meets Maoism: Badiou, Rancière, Žižek, Foucault, 
and others.
-       European cinematic Maoism as orientalist discourse. 
Post-colonial approaches.
-       Pan-Asian Maoism: reception, resistance, and memory.
-       Anti-Maoism in Taiwan and Hong Kong: representations and 
(counter-)theories.

Discourses

-       Maoist films as historical documents: factories, communes, 
students’ protests, strikes.
-       Maoism, cinephilia, and cinephobia. The relationship between 
Maoist thought and images.
-       Militant magazines and their understanding of cinema and the 
visual arts.
-       Cahiers du cinéma, Cinéthique, Ombre rosse and other magazines 
(both Western and Asian, official and underground): critical reception 
of Maoism and its relation with political activism.
-       New Japanese Cinema: Wakamatsu, Oshima (and their “brothers”) 
and revolutionary cinema.
-       Asian revolutions’ agitprop: newsreels and feature-length films, 
theories, and practices in Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, and North Korea.

Representations

-       Maoism in militant cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.
-       Echoes of Maoism in popular and genre cinema.
-       Concepts and practices of Authorship as opposed to the 
de-subjectivation practices encouraged by the Cultural Revolution
-       Survivals and reincarnations of Maoism in contemporary cinema.
-       Representation of Mao and the Cultural Revolution in cinema, 
television, documentary, and international media.
-       The missing image: the ban of Maoist images and discourses in 
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and so on: propaganda, counter-propaganda, 
anti-communism.

  Submission details

Contributors are asked to submit an abstract (300-500 words, 5 keywords, 
and 5 bibliographical references) and a short biographical note (150 
words) to (submissions.cinemaetcie /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(submissions.cinemaetcie /at/ gmail.com)>, (dallagas /at/ unive.it) 
<mailto:(dallagas /at/ unive.it)>, (corrado.neri /at/ univ-lyon3.fr) 
<mailto:(corrado.neri /at/ univ-lyon3.fr)> and (federico.zecca /at/ uniba.it) 
<mailto:(federico.zecca /at/ uniba.it)> by July 3, 2017. All notifications of 
acceptance will be sent no later than July 10, 2017. If accepted, 4,000 
word essays will then be required by October 30, 2017, after which they 
will be submitted to peer review.

---------------
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
---------------