[Commlist] CfP: Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media - Coming to Latin America: Moving Image Encounters, Non-Latin American Practitioners

Call for Papers

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media

https://www.alphavillejournal.com

Special Issue: Coming to Latin America: Moving Image Encounters, 
Non-Latin American Practitioners

Editors: Dr Lawrence Alexander (University of Oxford) and Javier 
Pérez-Osorio (University of Cambridge)

The editors of a forthcoming Alphaville special issue titled “Coming to 
Latin America: Moving Image Encounters, Non-Latin American 
Practitioners” seek contributions from scholars across various 
disciplines to investigate the moving image encounters that occur when 
practitioners from beyond the continent produce work in and about Latin 
America. While Latin American art cinema, in particular, has often been 
a site of confluence between local narratives and external funding from 
the Global North, filmmakers such as Harun Farocki, Apichatpong 
Weerasethakul and Agnès Varda have occupied both cultural and 
geographical spaces that are at once peripheral and hegemonic in 
relation to the continent. At the same time, the editors of the proposed 
special issue are also interested in approaches to Latin America's 
history, culture and politics that present the opportunity to stage 
solidarity or critique from other parts of the Global South.

Examining the external perspectives of these practitioners provides an 
important opportunity to situate cultural production on the continent 
within broader, global networks of capital and distribution: often known 
under the marker of the “transnational”. Our focus on Latin America as a 
ground for such intermedial and transnational investigations figures the 
continent’s transition from periphery to “centre” in contemporary moving 
image production and scholarship. Evaluating these shifts in terrain 
invites the possibility to consider how these developments continue to 
be shaped by intersecting constellations of different media.

The key questions this issue seeks to investigate are:

- What visions of Latin American identity do these encounters project 
and how do they differ from the continent’s collective cinematic 
self-image? What tropes do they reproduce or contest?

- What happens when questions of violence and trauma (historic and 
contemporary) specific to and even characteristic of the Latin American 
continent are approached by non-Latin American moving image 
practitioners? This might include the violence of political repression 
and (civil) conflict, state and insurgent terror, violence against 
women, the experience of queer and gender non-conforming people, and the 
traumatic “past” of colonisation.

- Are these social and political realities more safely viewed from an 
oblique perspective or an external angle than from closer to home?

- What are the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of 
approaching these questions from an external perspective? How should we 
approach such considerations in the current context of transnational 
analyses of moving image production and circulation?

- How can we compare the trajectories of practitioners approaching Latin 
America from different parts of the world (coming from Europe (and Spain 
and Portugal in particular), the Global South, North America, etc.) and 
across media? How do these encounters map onto decolonial critiques of 
moving images and their production? Conversely, how can particular 
journeys to Latin America stage South-South solidarities?

- How does a historical and comparative approach to these trajectories 
illuminate the continent’s transition from a peripheral space that 
captured the revolutionary imagination of filmmakers in the twentieth 
century to a centre in the neoliberal market logics that define 
contemporary global art cinema? What continuities and ruptures can be 
found across these historical narratives?

We aim to assemble a special issue of 8–10 articles (each of up to 7,000 
words inclusive of notes but excluding references) for publication in 
Alphaville in Summer 2025. We particularly welcome contributors who work 
on cinema and cultural production in Brazilian, Caribbean, and Latin 
American contexts beyond the Southern Cone. We would also like to 
receive contributions on practitioners approaching Latin America from 
elsewhere in the Global South.

Abstract submission: Interested authors should submit an abstract (300 
words) and an up-to-date biographical note (100 words) to 
(lawrence.alexander /at/ rsa.ox.ac.uk) and (jap93 /at/ cam.ac.uk) by 5th April 2024. 
Acceptance notices will be circulated shortly after and upon acceptance, 
we will provide authors with further instructions for submitting their 
contributions. Please note: the deadline for submission of draft 
articles for peer review will be 1st October 2024. Video essays with a 
supporting text can also be considered. Articles must adhere to 
Alphaville Guidelines and House Style.

Alphaville is a diamond open-access journal, and it requests no fee from 
authors or readers. Visit us on https://www.alphavillejournal.com/


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