ABSTRACT
Teaching “the world” appears to be a ludicrous ambition in the tradition of Band Aid’s much critiqued ambition to “feed the world,” yet this is what many of us aspire to do in our world cinema or transnational cinema courses. We are motivated by contradictory impulses: the desire to inform our students about “the world outside our (national) window” to cite Band Aid again, and the awareness of our own limitations as scholars. This position piece is born out of our research interests seen through our co-editorship of the Routledge journal Transnational Cinemas 1 (along with Armida de la Garza), and our pedagogical interests put into practice through the co-development of a module, “World and Transnational Cinema,” of the film studies undergraduate program at the University of Portsmouth, UK (2007–2014). In fact, our idea for the journal developed from the design and teaching of the course and the resulting desire to generate new research on transnational cinema and gather it under one paper and electronic “roof.” The aims and scope of the journal state that Transnational Cinemas has emerged in response to a shift in global film cultures and how we understand them. Dynamic new industrial and textual practices are being established throughout the world and the academic community is responding. Transnational Cinemas, the journal, aims to break down traditional geographical divisions in the same way as the courses that many academics are developing. Interestingly, the academic objectives that underpin the founding of the journal are no different from the pedagogical intentions that frame our teaching, as both the classroom and the publication provide a forum to debate the notion of transnational filmmaking.
