Evolving global screen environments in the last decade have triggered fundamental changes to the phenomena previously understood as the “transnational,” as content creators articulate new forces that connect and at times separate people and institutions across national and cultural borders. As such, transnational film, television and miscellaneous screen content have better recognised the decline in national sovereignty as a regulatory influence on global coexistence. The transnational as a critical concept has evolved to lens the economic, aesthetic and socio-political effects of globalisation, incorporating theoretical works from fields such as postcolonialism, consumerism, border studies and postnationalism.

Transnational cinema situates itself within this developing concept, engaging with these theoretical paradigms as they relate to the cultural and economic aspects of film, considering the production, consumption, and effect of screens that span national boundaries, as it can also challenge the very idea of geopolitical borders. Transnational cinema urges a deeper cognisance of regional cinema, as national identity is composed of separate and fragmented communities that are increasingly defined by social and economic class, sexuality, gender, generation, religion, ethnicity, political orientation and fashion. Enveloping and engaging with these concepts, transnationalism lenses the innovations of the contemporary world, imagined by a diverse range of filmmakers across a global system. The far-reaching conglomeration of big tech, too, represents a globalised social and economic attitude in favour of autonomous nations.

As Deborah Shaw notes in Transnational Cinema: Mapping a Field of Study (2017), these distinctions have encouraged fruitful debates around the applications, effects, and functions of transnationalism within a broad range of academic endeavour. Fields including early cinema, star studies, remakes/adaptations, feminist film theory, fan studies, exploitation cinema, genre studies, experimental film, the growing area of video essays, sound studies, readings of race, regional/national studies, the business/economics of film,  and audience studies, among others, comprise the critical debate on the screen’s reflection of our rapidly evolving world.

The scope of this conference is to expand on this conversation, reflecting on the origins and the evolutions of global screens, and consider these concepts and their applications within literature and cinema studies.

The Sydney Literature and Cinema Network is seeking a variety of applications to present on the themes of the conference that may include:

  • Transnational literature and screen histories
  • Gender and race in transnational literature and screen studies
  • Development of genres
  • Transnational audiences
  • Interrogations of research methodologies
  • Transnational film industries
  • Transnational television
  • Transnational literature
  • Transnational filmmaking
  • Adaptation and remakes
  • Transnational narratives
  • National and other borders on the transnational screen

We welcome 20-minute papers, video lectures and essays, pre-organised panels (can be longer than twenty minutes), forums and other presentations on these themes and more. We invite the submission of abstracts for individual proposals and panels by the 12th of February, 2021, and encourage international applicants to apply. Please send a 250 word abstract and a short biography to Dr. Blythe Worthy and Dr. Sabina Rahman at sydneyliteratureandcinemacs4@gmail.com.