Dr Antônio M da Silva, Language Coordinator in Portuguese from the Department of Modern Languages, is co-editing with Mariana A C da Cunha from the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, a collection provisionally titled Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema for the publisher Palgrave Macmillan.
The editors are seeking original contributions for the collection, 5,000 to 6,000 words in length, to explore interdisciplinary perspectives of space in Brazilian cinema, that may include perspectives on class, gender, race, and how these are influenced by space and spatial practices.
Approaches engaging with the fields of geography, politics, philosophy, gender studies and urban studies, that will address the implications of their investigation on the relationship between space and subjectivity are particularly welcome.
The full call for submissions is below. In the first instance, please send a 250-300 word abstract, with five bibliographic references and a brief biography, to spaceandsubjectivity@gmail.com by Tuesday 5 January 2016.
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Full call for submissions:
Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema
Antônio M da Silva and Mariana A C da Cunha, editors
The many theoretical turns taken by film studies since the 1970s have opened up a fertile field for interdisciplinary work that brought to the fore ontological, phenomenological, cognitivist, and historical approaches, amongst others, to the field of cinema and television studies. The so-called ‘spatial turn’ has seen the inevitable cross-fertilization between film theory and cultural geography, and has raised new questions about the concepts of space, place and landscape in cinema, as well as providing new models and tools for film analysis. In the past fifteen years, Brazil produced and released over one thousand films, and has seen a gradual increase in production in the many regions and states of this continental-sized nation. This geographical diversity is reflected in recent films’ narrative choices, in which new territories and social groups are being portrayed.
The edited interdisciplinary volume Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema seeks original contributions which bring renewed approaches to the relationship between space and subjectivity in Brazilian cinema from 1990 onwards, but especially the cinema of the new millennium. Over the past decades some Brazilian film scholars have produced seminal work concerned with questions of space in film, which have predominantly focused on either rural or urban spaces, especially the representation of the urban slums and the sertão, which are considered by many to be the most iconic spaces of the country’s cinema. This collection, however, aims to move beyond these two recurring spaces, thus broadening the set of spatial practices and experiences, and the roles of cinematic spaces in the construction of subjectivities in the films. Rather than considering space as an element subordinated to the narrative, and whose roles are limited to situating stories and providing a representation of reality, this volume takes spatiality as a powerful condition of cinema that can reveal aesthetic, political, social and historical meanings of the cinematographic image.
We encourage submissions of chapter proposals that consider interdisciplinary perspectives of space in cinema and discussions of specific fiction and documentary films that provide new ways of looking at contemporary Brazilian cinema through space. They may include the ways in which subjectivities are connected to space through social class, gender and/or racial representations; how subjectivities are influenced by space and spatial practices in the contemporary world and its circumstances, such as migration, globalization, natural disasters, violence, economic shifts; or how cinematic spaces can evoke senses of self, reality, memory, affect, movement, power or dislocation. We are also interested in exploring seldom represented territories in the English-language scholarship, such as tropical forests, fishing villages, marshlands, agricultural farmsteads, town ghettos, landless and/or homeless group settlements, built environments, to list a few.
Particular areas we are seeking chapters on include:
- Embodied spaces and subjectivities
- Places and non-places
- Social and geographical spaces
- Boundaries and political spaces
- Resistance, contested spaces and militant subjectivities
- Natural and urban landscapes
- The relationship between intimate experiences and spaces
- Gendered and queer spaces.
We particularly welcome interdisciplinary approaches and theoretical perspectives of cinema that engage with the fields of geography, politics, philosophy, gender studies and urban studies, that will address the implications of their investigation on the relationship between space and subjectivity in Brazilian contemporary cinema.
- Please send your proposal (title, 250-300-word abstract, up to 5 bibliographical references, and brief biography) as electronic attachment to the editors (spaceandsubjectivity@gmail.com) by January 05, 2016
- Notifications of acceptance: January 15, 2016
- Completed chapters due April 15, 2016
Chapter length: 5,000 to 6,000 words (footnotes and bibliographical references included).
- Chapters returned to authors: by May 30, 2016
- First redrafted chapters due on: July 10, 2016
- First redrafted chapters returned to authors: by August 05, 2016
- Deadline for final revised chapters: 01 September 2016
- Manuscript submission date: 30 September 2016
- Expected publication: 2017
Please note that these are strict deadlines due to negotiations with the publisher.