Teaching Transnational Cinema ─ Politics and Pedagogy

This collection focuses on the value of the analysis and discussion of transnational films in the university classroom, and the specific pedagogical, political and conceptual challenges that are posed by this subject. Exploring films likeChildren of Men, Babel, and Slumdog Millionaire, contributors engage with issues related to immigrant identities, transnational encounters, foreignness, cosmopolitanism and citizenship, the politics of visibility, terrorism and the War on Terror, legality, and race.

Posing questions about the value of cinema in interdisciplinary academic study and the changing strategies and philosophies of teaching in the university, Marciniak and Bennett’s collection positions itself on the cutting edge of transnational film studies.

Katarzyna Marciniak is Professor in the Department of English at Ohio University. She is the co-editor ofImmigrant Protest: Politics, Aesthetics, and Everyday (SUNY Press, 2014) and the author ofStreets of Crocodiles: Photography, media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland(Intellect, 2010).

Bruce Bennett is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University. He is the co-editor ofCinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and his most recent monograph isThe Cinema of Michael Winterbottom: Borders, Intimacy, Terror (Columbia University Press, 2014).