Call for Papers
Wooster Transnational Cinema is inviting submissions of film scholars for our special winter issue devoted to China’s rural reform and national identity. To be modern in China often means moving away from farming as a way of life and into an industrial civilization driven by a free market. Crosscutting between the local and global, Chinese cinema helps make comprehensible this monumental change. We look forward to paper submissions discussing the impact of global capitalism and problematics of identity in films with a sharp focus on China’s rural communities. The topics we invite include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Sentimental approach and/or attitudes to pre-modern cultures as morally superior to commodity economies
- the primitive within the modern; a return to (bad) nature?
- The roles of nostalgia and uses of aesthetics of primitivism in Chinese cinema
- Is realism in Chinese cinema any different from the literary realism as defined by Lucien Goldmann that Balzac novels “. . . might constitute the only great literary expression of the world as structured by the conscious values of the bourgeoisie: individualism, the thirst for power, money, and eroticism, which triumph over the ancient feudal values of altruism, charity, and love”?
- Is (rural) reform not a collision of two incompatible moral “goods” or ethical systems, with traditional ways of life being modernized out of existence when the good things in life are corrupted, degraded and turned into commodities?
- To the Chinese (filmmakers), is market economy any less of a threat to their identity than how Harvard Professor Michael J. Sandel believes it is to American identity? “We lives at a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets–and market values–have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.” (What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, 2012) Is (rural) China any different from a situation where markets crowd out morals?
- Does Chinese cinema that represents the economic reform of the past 40 years support the view of the “conservative” or “liberal”, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan understands the terms: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself“? Is the reform destruction or salvation to the filmmakers?
- “Cultural America is under siege”, Samuel P. Huntington warns us in his book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. (2004) Are his preoccupations with the centrality of Anglo-Protestant culture in America not echoed and replicated by Chinese filmmakers with same anxiety over the challenges to Confucian values and institutions central to Chinese cultural identity?
Wooster Transnational Cinema is a bilingual academic journal and its publications are peer-reviewed by film critics and professional translators. We celebrate diversity of views and welcome the contributions of interdisciplinary academics with vastly different research interests, findings or insights. The journal is run by following staff on the editorial board:
- Rujie Wang, senior staff member to post on Teams your paper anonymously (only a number) for the editors to review
- Jacob Cook, senior editor and historian to tally review results and make recommendations
- Colin Tobin, coeditor
- Austin Hanna, coeditor, business consultant and Chinese-English translator
- Zoe Seymore, co-editor of Fort Worth Office, Texas
- Frank Adams, co-editor, historian and Chinese-English translator
- Justin Garibotti, coeditor and Spanish-English translator
- Jenny Renner, coeditor
- Ding-sheng Luo, coeditor from Shenzhen Office, China
- Eric Jia, coeditor of Beijing Office, China
- Emma Harrison, co-editor
- Bilegsanaa Battulga, co-editor of Ulaanbaatar Office, Mongolia
- Amanda Han, co-editor and English-Chinese translator
- Tim Arace, co-editor of Columbus Office
- Lijiayi Wang, coeditor of Beijing Bureau
The anonymous selection process and reviewing criteria
Each editor is expected to read all submissions, no more than 4-pages long, and grade the paper with a letter. S/he is also expected to offer brief explanation(s) of why the paper(s) deserve the letter grade, and considerations given to such qualities as originality of the work, clarity of ideas, research, relevance to current issues, and appeal to people in other academic fields.