Global Cult Cinemas calls for a decolonisation of cult film studies.
To date, discourses of cult cinema have predominantly focused upon Anglo-American cinema and its reception in the West. Even when cult scholarship has expanded to include non-English language cinema from regions such as East and Southeast Asia, what nevertheless tends to define these cinemas as cult has been the subcultural fandom for those films in the West. Shifting the focus onto cult film traditions and fandoms beyond the Anglosphere, Global Cult Cinemas makes a decisive intervention in the field by calling for a decolonisation of cult film studies.
This volume therefore interrogates both the coloniality and gendered nature of much cult scholarship and the extent to which an implicit white male perspective needs challenging in an age of decolonising the academy. Our contributors focus their research on circuits of cult film production and reception beyond the predominant Anglophone centres, with particular attention to cult practices across the Global South. Chapters include investigations of specific cult film traditions within countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and Pakistan, alongside explorations of the politics of indigenous cult filmmaking, the global circulation of cult icons such as El Santo, and the status of auteurs such as Alejandro Jodorowsky in the era of #MeToo. In sum, this collection critiques the Eurocentric assumptions that lie at the heart of much existing cult film scholarship, and offers new ways of theorizing global cult cinemas to work towards the goal of decolonising cult film studies.
Introduction “De-Westernizing Cult Film Studies”
Dolores Tierney (University of Sussex, UK), Iain Robert Smith (King's College London, UK), and Shruti Narayanswamy (University of St Andrews, UK)
Part I – Reconsidering the Cult Paradigm: Race/Gender/Postcoloniality
1. The Whiteness of Cult
Iain Robert Smith (King’s College London, UK)
2. Alejandro Jodorowsky in the Era of #MeToo
Victoria Ruétalo (University of Alberta, Canada)
3. Fangirls, Feminists and Horror Knitters: Female Audiences of ‘Asia Extreme’ Films in the Me Too Era.
Emma Pett (University of York, UK)
4. First Nations and Cult Cinema: Invisible, Assimilated, or Free?
Ernest Mathijs (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Part II – Cult Audiences and Reception
5. Old Temple, New Worshippers: Contemporary Online Audiences for Indian Cult Cinema
Shruti Narayanswamy (University of St Andrews, UK)
6. Nascent Cult Viewing: Spanish Language Audiences and Theatres in New York and New Jersey 1969-1973
Dolores Tierney (University of Sussex, UK)
7. Cine de Culto, Cine Bizarro, Cine Inusual: Cult Cinema and Its Divergences in Argentina
Jonathan Risner (Indiana University Bloomington, USA)
8. Cult Across the Curtain: Receptions of the Czech Crazy Comedy at Home and Abroad
Jonathan Owen (Independent Researcher)
9. Maula Jatt; Or the Strange Case of Cult Cinema and Cinephilia in Pakistan
Syeda Momina Masood (University of the Punjab, Pakistan)
10. The Indonesian Context of Cult Cinema: The Cases of New Order’s Exploitation Films
Ekky Imanjaya (Bina Nusantara University, Indonesia)
Part III – Cult Auteurs, Stars, and Genres
11. Precarity, Opportunism, and a Stroke of Luck: Rafaele Rossi and Cult Filmmaking in Brazil
Stephanie Dennison (University of Leeds, UK) and Laura Cánepa (Anhembi Morumbi University, São Paulo, Brazil)
12. Roger Corman in Ireland: The Saga of the Cult Auteur, the Irish Film Industry, and the Transnational Straight-to-video Market in the 1990s
Nessa Johnston (Edge Hill University, UK)
13. The Cult of Rekha: Bollywood Stardom and Diva Worship in the Digital Era
Michael Lawrence (University of Sussex, UK)
14. From “Cines de Barrio” to Global Cult: The Films of El Santo, El Enmascarado de Plata (The Man in the Silver Mask)”
Antonio Lázaro-Reboll (University of Kent, UK)
15. Out of South Africa: Direct-to-Video, Zaxploitation, and Allegories of Space
Ivo Ritzer (University of Bayreuth, Germany)
16. Tales of Entrails: Animist Cult Horror in Southeast Asia
Rosalind Galt (King’s College London, UK)
Index
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