CFP Fragmented Nightmares: Transnational Horror across Visual Media (9/15/11)

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=186441

Call for essays for edited collection: Fragmented Nightmares: Transnational Horror across Visual Media

This anthology will investigate the horror genre across national boundaries and different media forms. Perhaps more than any other genre, horror is characterized by its ability to be simultaneously aware of the local while able to permeate national boundaries, to function on both regional and international registers. Horror, in testing the limits of identity, manifested its transnational nature early on, establishing grids of intersection between art, film, theater, and new technologies. Yet, even historically attuned theories have continued to locate the American industry at the center of most discussions, in the process ossifying a sense of the dominant and the marginal. Our book attempts to trouble the idea that horror emerges from one particular region (i.e., Hollywood) and is then disseminated to “peripheral” cultures (or cultures in development). Instead we examine horror as an integrated network that belies a center/periphery model. For example, horror has often functioned as a facade for marginal artistic or political movements, including 1960s and 70s international co-productions of horror/exploitation films, art cinema modes, feminist art installations, or post-colonial trash cinema.

This book will investigate alternative genealogies of horror: those that are not centered in the American horror industry, do not necessarily emerge from Freudian notions of the unconscious, or take into account a broader sense of horror beyond cinema. More specifically, we are interested in political models and allegories, questions of cult or subcultural media and their distribution practices, the relationship between regional or cultural networks, and the legibility of international horror iconography across distinct media. This book will stress how a discussion of contemporary international horror is not only about genre but how genre can inform theories of visual cultures and the increasing permeability of their borders.

Potential topics for the anthology include:
• analysis of transnational horror in film, television, digital media, video games, museum/art installations, photography, graphic novels, and web series
• transnational remakes and reception
• alternative theoretical models
• adaptation
• interventions from lesser-known cinemas into dominant markets
• inter/intra governmental roles in media production
• paracinema across nations
• censorship
• international, regional, or local language co-productions

Please send a 500 word proposal/abstract to Dana Och (dcost7@pitt.edu) or Kirsten Strayer (kis12@pitt.edu) by Sept 15.

Dana Och
University of Pittsburgh
501 Cathedral of Learning
5200 Fifth Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Email: dcost7@pitt.edu