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.