[Commlist] CFP | From Yesterday’s Margins to Today’s: Towards Decolonizing Curricula, Pedagogy, and Research in Transnational Screen Media

*call for proposals for a special issue /Transnational Screens/*

*“From Yesterday’s Margins to Today’s: Towards Decolonizing Curricula, 
Pedagogy, and Research in Transnational Screen Media”*

*edited by Sheetal Majithia (New York University Abu Dhabi) and Dale 
Hudson (New York University Abu Dhabi)*


With transnational reverberations of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) 
movement over the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, students have 
rightfully asked (again) for faculty to decolonize their curricula, 
pedagogy, and research. Their calls echo and join ones by other 
students-led protests, notably the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South 
Africa in 2015, reverberating back into Britain five years later. They 
want to direct our attention as educators and scholars to ways that 
epistemological violence translates into physical violence when 
particular perspectives are marginalized, belittled, omitted, or 
delegitimized in our courses, classrooms, and publications.

To unsettle these frameworks and participate in the ongoing work of 
decolonizing curricula, pedagogy, and research, previously marginalized 
or excluded perspectives need to be amplified, so as to change the very 
constitution of frameworks that define screen studies. The transnational 
turn in screen studies has focused extensively on understanding (a) 
political economies of film financing, production, distribution, 
exhibition, and reception and (b) perspectives of diasporic, exilic, and 
other transnational subjectivities. More work, however, remains to be 
done on (c) curricula and pedagogy as they affect research both by 
students and faculty.

The editors of a proposed special edition of /Transnational 
Screens/ invite proposals for new articles on ways to work towards 
decolonizing curricula, pedagogy, and research in screen media. In 
particular, this proposed issue aims to investigate the transnational 
dimension of teaching /against/ conventional frameworks, their scope and 
methods, employed in introductory courses that were largely developed 
decades ago in western universities; that is to say, we are looking for 
alternative approaches to introducing the field that acknowledge the 
vast changes in the world (e.g., inauguration of film/media studies in 
universities around the world) and also the proliferation of screen 
media over the past three decades.

Most media today, however, is nonwestern, as it was for past 
generations, though that media was often excluded or overlooked by the 
field. Most media today, however, is also nonprofessional in the sense 
that the means of production are no longer monopolized by commercial 
studios, state agencies, and élite independent filmmakers. Introductory 
courses often exclude more than they address. They also 
disproportionately emphasize European and Hollywood films. Recent 
introductory books, such as Roy Stafford’s /The Global Film Book/ (BFI, 
2014) and Meta Mazaj and Shekhar Deshpande’s /World Cinema: A Critical 
Introduction/ (Routledge, 2018), move beyond traditional structures that 
contained nonwestern filmmaking as a supplement (often in added chapters 
in later editions) to an unmarked focus on western filmmaking as 
filmmaking-in-general rather than as an occasion to reconceptualize the 
field. We feel that work towards decolonizing how we introduced the 
field has only begun.

To counter the lingering eurocentrism that introduces screen studies to 
students, the proposed issue seeks to amplify perspectives from 
“yesterday’s margins” (e.g., anyplace outside the European subcontinent, 
its settler colonies, and its élite classes in zones of colonization) 
that might help decolonize thinking in “today’s margins” (e.g., the 
European subcontinent, its settler colonies, and its élite classes in 
zones of colonization). We are interested in perspectives from 
“yesterday’s margins,” which includes /major/ film industries in China, 
India, Nigeria, and South Korea (despite the fact that such places were 
never marginal from non-eurocentric perspectives), alongside ones from 
/minor/ filmmaking locations, including indigenous peoples and 
subnational groups, to help update frameworks in “today’s margins,” 
particularly the United States.

Rather than a /unified/ decolonial approach, we look towards 
/multiple/ decolonial approaches, each carving out a different space for 
new and renewed debates from a particular perspective. To widen the 
field, we are prioritizing historically marginalized perspectives. We 
ask contributors to consider how they would teach an introductory course 
in contexts historically defined or self-defined as indigenous, 
nonwestern, and Global South. We are particularly interested in 
perspectives from faculty either (a) teaching in a language other than 
English or (b) teaching in English in places where English is one of the 
official languages and/or functions as a university language.

We are interested in how faculty acknowledge the frequent market 
domination of foreign media—notably commercial narrative films from 
Bollywood, Hallyuwood, Hollywood, Kollywood, Mollywood, Nollywood, and 
other transnational industries—while also recognizing local media, 
whether commercial, independent, or nonprofessional (“amateur”). What 
“supplements” are needed to existing introductory textbooks? What films 
from the western canons of western and select nonwestern realist films, 
if any*,* are necessary to include? What kinds of “small” or short-form 
media are useful to convey a sense of important debates, histories, 
issues, and ultimately perspectives that are not present, both in 
dominant media available in theaters and cinéclubs, on television and 
VOD? What pedagogies can acknowledge different kinds of learning and 
knowledge production?

We are looking for articles that demonstrate how we might expand the 
scope and methods of introducing the field from what is included in 
conventional introductory courses to also consider forms that are often 
ignored or marginalized, such as activist media, animation, archival 
media (colonial films, education films, etc.), community media, 
documentary (short- and long-form, television, theatrical, interactive, 
state, private, etc.), experimental media, and short films.

We are also interested in assignments that engage both critical thinking 
and critical making. With the availability of relatively inexpensive 
hardware (camera, phone cameras, etc.) and open-source (editing, 
animation, special effects, etc.) software, what assignments have 
faculty devised to respond to dominant media? What assignments can work 
against arbitrary divisions between film/media studies and film/media 
production that were developed decades ago? With the availability of 
official and unofficial archives (from BFI’s Colonial Film to YouTube), 
what curatorial assignments have faculty devised to respond to the 
canons in textbooks? What other strategies have faculty devised to 
integrate student perspectives into curriculum?

Possible reorienting questions include:

·How does an introductory course in film or screen studies look when it 
is conceived from the perspective of yesterday’s margins?

·How can these perspectives help decolonize today’s margins?

·How can we reimagine the field to prioritize multiple perspectives in 
relation to one another?

·What types of assignments can be integrated into such courses that 
encourage different kinds of learning? How can they combine critical 
thinking into critical making?

·What is the place of the untranslatable and opaque on our syllabi? How 
do we convey that our courses cannot render screen media into 
transparent texts that we can decode with certainty? How do we convey 
that there are forms of knowledge that are not meant to be shared—and 
that epistemological sovereignty must be respected?

·What are the localized forms of oppression that come into focus when we 
move beyond the internationalism of “world cinema”? How do we include 
them without re-inscribing foreign prejudices?

·How do we challenge the power of international coproduction and 
transnational financing, as well as film festivals, in shaping our 
understanding of screen media according to national or transnational 
frameworks?

·What changes when we integrate media available on free-to-use VOD like 
YouTube alongside media available only through pay-for-use platforms?

·How can decolonizing perspectives forward abolitionist objectives 
concerning human trafficking, modern slavery, prison industries, refugee 
“crises”?

·What role does comparison play that is different in a transnational 
context as opposed to national, international, and world cinemas? Is it 
possible to find objects of study beyond comparison?

*Proposals should be between 400 and 500 words and accompanied by a 
short 100-word bio and a CV. Please submit to Leanne Talavera at 
(lmt459 /at/ nyu.edu) <mailto:(lmt459 /at/ nyu.edu)> by 20 July 2021. Articles will be 
7000–8000 words.*



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