Theorizing World Cinema

This is a book about the place of World Cinema in the cultural imaginary. It repositions World Cinema in a wider discursive space than traditionally has been the case. It treats World Cinema as an object of theoretical enquiry, rather than as a commercial or classificatory label, and uses a range of approaches and case studies whose organizing principle will be the developing notion of polycentrism as applied to cinema. It seeks to refine and redefine some key-concepts in film studies such as: identification; representation and identity; narrativity and the everyday; allegory and referentiality; auteurism and the popular; modes of production; dominance and hegemony. It uses polycentrism to discuss and 
re-evaluate how cinema shapes and responds to the philosophical, cultural and political effects of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism in the age of the moving image; and it explores the interconnectedness of films produced worldwide, the links between cinema and other visual cultural forms, between histories and modes of expression.