CFP for Issue 6.1

Call for papers: A special issue of Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images, 6.1 (Summer 2026)

Title: Cinema in Global Chinatowns

The study of cinema in global Chinatowns has developed through the work of scholars focusing on the transpacific flow of films and film workers during the twentieth century and the social and cultural roles of diaspora cinema in the United States. As such, it has engaged with a range of theoretical approaches and methodologies. Transnational film studies responded to early film scholarship’s centering of national cinema through an opening up of national and cultural borders, problematizing any natural inclination towards linking film to one nationality and/or culture. Essay collections such as Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Lu, 1997), Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (Lu and Yeh, 2005), and Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics (Bergen-Aurand, Mazzilli, and Hee, 2015) instead look to the ways in which language, ethnicity, and even embodiment inform Chinese cinema. At the same time, diasporic film studies further shifted away from a focus on the nation-state and towards more heterogeneous modes of identification, linking particular film histories to the movement of communities of immigrants and exiles. Gina Marchetti describes such films as dealing with the “Chinese experience of dislocation, relocation, emigration, immigration, cultural hybridity, migrancy, exile, and nomadism — together termed the “Chinese diaspora’” (1998). Other analytical frameworks such as Sinophone studies push back against the ethnocentricity of Chinese studies and the fraught temporality of diaspora. To this latter point, Shu-mei Shih provides a reminder that diaspora has an “expiration date,” as many of these communities eventually become part of the local population (2011).

This special issue of Global Storytelling brings the above theoretical frameworks into conversation with new cinema history by focusing on film distribution, exhibition, and moviegoing practices in global Chinatowns. We approach the topic in an open-ended and heterogeneous manner, considering the concept of Chinatown as encompassing not only urban ethnic enclaves but also ethnoburbs and heterolocal regions and recognizing the range of ethnic and racial formations in these communities. Additionally, we aim to decenter the overwhelmingly North American focus of Chinatown studies and to encourage global and comparative studies, thereby expanding our understanding of large-scale patterns as well as distinctiveness. Submissions may consider Chinese-language cinema or may feature non-Chinese-language films in a Sinophone space.

We encourage scholarly approaches from diverse fields, including film studies, media and cultural studies, area studies, urban studies, sociology, and anthropology. Methodologies may be quantitative or qualitative, and feature archives, counter-archives (private collections, ephemera) or oral histories.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

·       Advertising

·       Distribution

·       Commercial and non-commercial film exhibition

·       Private forms of exhibition, including home video, television, cable, streaming

·       Video stores

·       Audience studies

·       Moviegoing practices and experiences

·       Moviegoing ephemera

·       Reception

Important dates :

Abstract submission date: June 15, 2025

Acceptances/rejections: July 1, 2025

First draft article submission: mid Dec 2025

Comments returned: mid Jan 2026 

Revised article submission: late March 2026

Manuscripts finalized: early April 2026

Expected publication date: early July 2026

Submission details:

Please submit a detailed abstract of 500 words, which states the paper’s main argument, method, and contribution to the theme of this special issue. Abstracts should be accompanied by a bibliography and short biography (approx. 200 words). 

We also welcome short essays of 4000 words and video essays.

Submissions (abstracts and full papers) should follow Global Storytelling’s guidelines.

Please send abstracts and enquiries to: ldombrowski@wesleyan.edu and janet_louie@g.harvard.edu