Hosted by TecnoCampus Mataró (affiliated to Pompeu Fabra University)

CFP: “Openings: Rethinking Centres and Peripheries in Historical Research about Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception”

Deadline for proposals: 22 January 2023

Letters of acceptance/rejection: 6 February 2023

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Laura Fair, Columbia University, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies

The HoMER Network invites submissions for 20-minute papers, as well as designated roundtables, panels, and workshops to be presented at the conference.

We welcome papers from researchers across the academic spectrum as well as interdisciplinary work and encourage papers from postgraduate researchers and early career researchers.

The 2022 Homer conference in Rome opened with a keynote exploring the golden age of cinema audiences in Latin America and what prof. Ana Rosas Mantecón called “peripheral national cinemas beyond frontiers”. The 2022 conference theme ‘Across Borders: Audiences, Exhibition and Reception’ attracted exciting presentations focused on marginalized cinema cultures and practices as well as work on colonial cinema histories. The call for papers for the HoMER 2023 conference in Barcelona follows up on this theme by inviting papers that question dominant perspectives and approaches in new cinema history scholarship as well as papers about marginal historical cinemas and peripheral practices. Relevant questions in this CFP are how different approaches like decolonialism, transnationalism and inter-media can integrate other perspectives and enable new readings of already researched materials? How can gender, race and class perspectives help us reveal forgotten names from film exhibition and distribution, identify other dynamics of the changing articulation of exhibition and urban space, and renew our understanding of audiences?

The aim of the HoMER 2023 conference, “Opening(s): Rethinking Centres and Peripheries in Historical Research about Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception”, is to expand the academic field of new cinema history to a multiplicity of perspectives by encouraging a better comprehension of the dynamics between centres and peripheries. Scholars of historical research of moviegoing, exhibition and reception are invited to examine relations of power between ‘margins’ and ‘core’, between peripheries and metropoles. The key concept, ‘Opening(s)’ prompts us to ask what defines the relations of and for social, cultural, economic, and political power in new cinema history research and what are the implications of rethinking its peripheries and centres? ‘Opening(s)’ can involve exploring geographical, social, cultural, and linguistic positionings, borders, boundaries, and relations.

We welcome papers about historical research of moviegoing, exhibition and reception that relate to any or several of the following themes: NON-THEATRICAL SPACE, INTER-MEDIA, IDENTITIES, NATIONALISM, POST-NATIONALISM, POST-COLONIALISM, COLONIALISM, DE-COLONIZATION, TRANSNATIONALIZATION, TRANSLATION, DIASPORA, RACE, CLASS, GENDER, ETHNICITY, WHITENESS, (DIS)ABILITY, AGE, and INTERSECTIONAL studies.

We encourage papers which de-center narratives and critically explore dynamics between centres and peripheries, which question normative perspectives and positions, and make visible marginalized perspectives. This can for example involve post-colonial, diasporic or colonial actors and initiatives, and/ or racialized, LGBTQ+ or feminist perspectives.

• Possible topics to explore can include (but are not limited to):
• The transition from cinema to television, video and to digital devices in a post-colonial context
• The new cinema history and the post/de-colonial archive
• State-sponsored cinema in a post-colonial context
• Gender, identity, and diasporic audiences
• Cinema-going as an extraordinary event, involving for example performance, nostalgia, resistance, or activism
• Networks of distribution of non-Hollywood films
• Transnational distribution in a colonial context
• Changes, challenges, and shifts in recent cinema cultures: cinema-going, film consumption and exhibition practices.
• Gender, race and class perspectives in film exhibition and distribution
• New cinema histories of the Global South
• De-colonial approaches to new cinema histories/geographies
• GIS at the margins: Mapping alternative cinema histories.
• Open access data in new cinema history
• Intermedial approaches (radio, television, video, social media, platforms, pop cultures, fan cultures, etc.)
• Non-theatrical film exhibition and its spaces, such as street screenings, outdoor screenings, screenings on the facades of historical buildings, home cinemas, etc.
• Colonial entrepreneurs and cultural agency
• New readings, translations, and theoretical perspectives in different languages
• De-colonising, transnational and inter-media approaches
• The role of piracy in widening access and processes of audience development

Abstract Submission Form

Abstracts of 250 to 300 words, plus 3 or 4 bibliographic entries, and a 50-word academic biography can be submitted here: HoMER 2023 Abstract Submission Form. The form also allows for the submission of pre-constituted panels and workshops. Please notice that authors participating in a pre-constituted panel should submit an individual abstract that includes a reference to the pre-constituted panel that it is part of.

Link to the proposal form: HoMER 2023 Abstract Submission Form

For queries regarding submission, please contact conference co-ordinators:

Åsa Jernudd – asa.jernudd@oru.se

and Maria Luna Rassa –mlunar@tecnocampus.cat

Programming Committee

Julie Allen

Daniël Biltereyst

James M Burns

Sancler Ebert

Åsa Jernudd

Maria Luna Rassa

Dalila Missero

Clara Pafort-Overduin

Ana Rosas Mantecon

Daniela Treveri Gennari

Thunnis Van Oort

Local Organising Committee

TecnoCampus- Universitat Pompeu Fabra: 

Marta Carceller, Anna Gabriel Rovira, Aína Fernández Aragonés, Jorge Oter, Maria Luna Rassa. 

With the support of:

Research Office TecnoCampus

Research Group: NardRes (Narratives de la Resisténcia)