CFP: 14th Asian Cinema Studies Society Conference 2025 (May 22-24, 2025) -The University of Hong Kong

Call for Papers: What is Asian Cinema?

We invite paper and panel proposals to present at the 14th Asian Cinema Studies Society conference to be held at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) during May 22-24, 2025. As a non-profit scholarly organization, the Asian Cinema Studies Society (ACSS) actively fosters international research in Asian film and media and publishes the flagship peer-reviewed journal Asian Cinema (Intellect). With the support of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), the Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies Programme (MALCS), and the Department of Comparative Literature of HKU, ACSS brings its first face-to-face meeting since the global pandemic back to Hong Kong, a major Asian metropolis, transport hub, filmmaking capital, and connective node of regional, inter-Asian, and transpacific cultural globalization.

ACSS 2025 invites participants to present papers on any aspect of Asian film and media, though we encourage proposals that address the question: “What is Asian cinema?” Although often understood as cinematic practices, institutions, cultural formations, and critical discourses in or from Asia, the term “Asian cinema” belies its contradictions and complexities as an idea. Historically, scholars challenged such simplistic and binaristic understandings by investigating: how “Asia,” “Asian,” and “cinema” were defined under colonialism and postcolonialism; the way transnational productions trespass national and regional boundaries; the complex relations between home/ancestry/ethnicity/linguistic sharedness and diaspora; as well as how cinema itself often redefines and rewrites the meanings of “Asia” and “Asian.” Recently, theorists posit that the term “Asian cinema” implicitly constructs “cinema” and “media” as universal concepts modified by a particular concept: “Asian,” a construction that perpetuates the orientalist knowledge formation of Asia as an exception to the norm.

In light of these provocations, we ask: Does studying cinema in, from, about, or by Asia/Asians always suggest a power relation between an observer and an observed or an irreconcilable difference between Asia and somewhere else? Do strategically essential concerns justify the particularity of Asian film and media studies? How do evolving meanings and technologies of “cinema,” “film,” and “media” in our era of digital globalization reshape ideas of “Asia” or “Asian?” And, what was Asian cinema?

We welcome discussions and interventions addressing these questions both directly and indirectly, and from different disciplinary perspectives, methods, and approaches. Possible topics in relation to Asian film and media may include, but are not limited to:

● Colonialism, postcolonialism, decolonization, nationalism, empire, globalization

● Digital and online media, cultures, communities, and fandoms, streaming and platforms, video games, new media, seriality, intermediality, transmediality, post-cinema, big data, AI, CGI, deepfakes, surveillance

● Environmentalism, ecocriticism, animal studies and/or plant studies, anthropocene

● Film and media theory, philosophy, and discourse

● Historiography, memory, media archaeology and ecology, industry, exhibition, distribution, censorship/regulation, museology and curation, film festivals, stars

● LGBTQIA+, disability, race, ethnicity, class, feminism, and gender

● Pedagogy, production, performance, criticism, sound, music, effects, choreography

● Poetics, narrative, aesthetics, genre, documentary, experimental, animation, authorship, studios, independent, reception, audience, waves, movements

● Regional, national, transnational, indigenous, diaspora, language communities, refugee, exilic, inter-Asian, transpacific, Asian/American, Asian Australian, Asian Canadian

● Urban, rural, archipelagic, oceanic, and other spatial and environmental imaginaries

Please send proposals or enquiries to acssconference2025@gmail.com. For individual paper proposals, send a 200-300 word abstract and include the title, author name(s), institutional affiliation, mailing address, and email contacts, as well as a brief (50-100 word) biography of the contributor. For pre-constituted panel proposals (of 3-4 papers), provide a brief description (100 words) of the overall panel along with the individual abstracts and contributor information. Sessions will be 90 minutes in duration, and time limits will be strictly enforced. The deadline for submission of proposals is 10 November 2024. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by the end of January 2025.

There will be no conference registration fee per se, but all presenters must be members of the Asian Cinema Studies Society, which requires an annual fee of $550 HKD / $70 USD. Full-time students (with ID) and underemployed scholars may pay a discounted fee of $450 HKD / $57 USD. The fee covers one year membership, one volume (two issues) of Asian Cinema, and gives access to the society’s executive meeting at the conference.

Call for Articles on The reception of literary works: between translation and paratext - Dec 2024

Poli-femo n. 28

The reception of literary works: between translation and paratext

In a complex and stratified reflection on the reception of a literary work, the role of translation occupies a central position: it often represents a first encounter with foreign literature for the reader. Analysed from the perspective of literary reception, the study of translation may be conceived as a space for linguistic, literary and historical analysis of the phenomenon of translation itself, as the analytical models developed by the group of scholars of the Tel Aviv School, especially during the 1970s, serve to remind us.

We must also consider that in the general space in which the reception of the translated text takes place, we can observe highly heterogeneous factors that affect the work from perspectives that are more or less closely related to it: there are title changes, the publication of shortened editions, and editions in translation for a young audience of works that were originally written for an adult audience. These choices have repercussions on the act of translating and on the reflections it generates on literary and aesthetic issues - from lexical contributions to stylistic changes, through genre crossings from a source literary tradition to a target literary tradition - as well as on socio-cultural issues.

This stratified and heterogeneous overview also requires the consideration of other aspects through which the publishing phenomenon and the dissemination of literary works are explored. This means focusing on phenomena and aspects of the publishing sector, but also of the commercial, material or strictly intellectual spheres, aimed at influencing, conditioning and orienting the reading and 'consumption' of literary works through their translation. These are aspects that support the translation with a parallel, accompanying discourse, which feeds the so-called paratext, through which multiple editorial, authorial, critical, and translation issues can be expressed.

If, on the one hand, every correct interpretative practice reminds us that the translated work does not enjoy a fully autonomous status because it is linked to a source text from which it is inseparable, on the other hand, the palimpsestic nature of the accompanying paratext, rich in accessory information that hybridises the translated work, is configured as a privileged literary space for the construction of a cultural reading of the translated work, an aspect that determines the manner of its reception.

Within this multifaceted and dialectic scenario, the reception of the translated literary work is the product of nodal passages, ranging from interlinguistic transposition to cultural transition, to the representation of what is perceived as "other", in the long-distance dialogue established between the imaginaries of reception and the image of the "other" of which the translated work is the symbol and expression. These are operations that, in fact, in their fulfilment, attest to the at least dual, truly hybrid nature of the literary work in translation, a hybrid nature that can be found in the meshes of the translation itself as well as in the entire paratext accompanying it, as Gérard Genette reminds us in his renowned founding study on this subject.

Reflecting on all this will make it possible to define and position a proposal for reflection on the reception of literary works, understood both as a continuation of the studies and practice of translation, and as a broader cultural reading project, in which, thanks to the voices of the paratext, we find the signs - linguistic, aesthetic, imagological - of the mentalities, ideas, and cultural universes that come into contact in different historical periods and which, through this complex system of voices, converse and produce effects at a textual level.

Topics and issues that may be addressed include:

o The material conditions of the production and dissemination of a translation: ideology, censorship, imagery

o Literary and aesthetic issues: cultural terminology, changes in style, changes in genre

o Reception and image of the "other" in the authorial paratexts of translated texts

o Editorial paratexts and communication strategies of translated texts

o Voices in translated texts: authors, translators, critics, graphic designers, as forms of authorial hybridity

o Plasticity, visual paratextuality and literary reception

o Paratextuality: between text and discourse

o Linguistic and cultural transitions in the translation process: forms of referential hybridity

o Reception of the foreign intertext as a form of poetic hybridity

o Specialist journals, literary blogs, social media and their role in the dissemination and reception of translated texts

Further proposals for study on the subject put forward by those intending to collaborate in the publication will be seriously examined by the Scientific Committee, in order to widen the field of exploration undertaken in this issue of the Magazine. Contributions will be accepted in Italian, English and French.

15%

A Handbook Of Translation Studies

₹350.00

15%

Translation Studies: Theories and Applications

₹795.00

Translation Studies An Introduction

9%

DECENTERING TRANSLATION STUDIES

₹1,075.00

25%

Studies In Translation

₹895.00

TRANSLATION STUDIES READER

INTRODUCING TRANSLATION STUDIES : THEORIES AND APPLICATIONS, 5TH EDITION

26%

Translation Studies [Paperback] ababil

₹195.00

17%

Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (Translation Studies)

₹5,291.00

The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies (Routledge Companions)

To this end, the Editorial Board proposes the following deadlines: a preliminary and essential step is to send an abstract (min.10/max.20 lines), keywords and a brief curriculum vitae of the proposer, to redazione.polifemo@iulm.it by 15 March 2024 (absolute deadline).

Authors will receive confirmation of the acceptance of their contributions from the Editorial Office by 25 March 2024.

The deadline for submitting contributions is 15 June 2024.

All contributions will be subject to double blind peer review. After passing the peer-review phase, the contributions that will be accepted must be no longer than 35,000 characters in length, including spaces and footnotes.

The issue, edited by Prof. Paolo Proietti and Prof. Giovanna Zaganelli, will be published in December 2024.

andrea.chiurato@iulm.it