USA Africa Dialogue Series - CFP Children in World Cinema

Dear Colleagues,

Please post this CFP to the list. My apologies for any cross-posting

CFP: The Child in World Cinema 

Call for submissions to a collection that examines the child in World (non-Western) cinema. Many studies of the child character in film, or films made for children, too often focus on Western cinema and Western models of childhood. This collection seeks to broaden the discussion of the child image by close analysis of the child and childhood as depicted in non-Western cinemas. The child image in non-Western cinema provides a rich and varied landscape of meaning to notions of the child and childhood. Images of non-Western children in film are often elided from discussions about childhood within a wide range of cultural, political, and social matrices.  The meaning of "child" often assumes a Western framework that relies on problematic notions of innocence or purity that are then used to privilege white, Western notions of childhood. This collection seeks to offer a counter-narrative to Western notions of childhood as depicted in film. Contributions that examine the child image in films from Africa, Asia, South America, India, Australia, and the Middle East are particularly desired. While there are numerous important, empirical, data-driven studies about real children and conditions of real childhood in the Global South and other non-Western regions, this collection seeks essays that examine the child image and its philosophical, theoretical, historical, political, or cultural meanings as they appear in cinema from non-Western regions.

 

Please submit a 500 word abstract, current contact information along with brief biography (or CV) as Word attachments Debbie Olson at Debbieo@okstate.edu  by 31 July 2016.  Authors will be notified on or before 31 August 2016. The deadline for finished essays (using Chicago notes and bibliography style) is 31 January 2017. Please email if there are any questions.

 

Debbie Olson has a PhD in English- Screen Studies from Oklahoma State University and is Assistant Professor of English at Missouri Valley College. She is the author of Black Children in Hollywood Cinema: Cast in Shadow (2016 forthcoming) and has edited or co-edited a number of collections on children and popular culture, including Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema (2012), Portrayals of Children in Contemporary Culture (2013) Hitchcock's Children: The Child in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (2014), The Child in Post-Apocalyptic Cinema (2015), and Children in the Films of Steven Spielberg (2016).  She is the founder/editor-in-chief of Red Feather: An International Journal of Children's Popular Culture and Series Editor for Lexington's Children and Youth in Popular Culture Series.

 

Thank you,

Debbie Olson