![]() If the idea of world cinema has to do with opening our worlds in encounters with others, it means giving up our isolationist tendencies, parochial views, and intolerance toward the others. This discord gives the project of World Cinema a political urgency far beyond the academic sphere. While the visions of cosmopolitanism at the heart of World Cinema are hardly rosy and carry an awareness of unequal power relations, histories of colonialism, and domination that have defined cross-border and cross-cultural relations, these visions seem drowned by locally articulated yet globally spread pronouncements of derision, fear, and exclusion of others. ![]() It is ever present in festival programing, streaming services, popular press, as well as in the academic sphere, reflected by numerous publishing initiatives that include the launch of this journal, along with publications such as the Tauris World Cinema Series and the Routledge Companion to World Cinema.Ĭontrary to this growth, the world seems to be shrinking in front of our eyes. Parallel with these developments is the growing importance of World Cinema as a term and as a discipline. The rising popularity of the term and a rapid growth of the discipline of World Cinema points to a variety of forces that have made the world bigger, more diverse, and more interconnected, from new technologies and networks of distribution and exhibition to the proliferation of film festivals. The discord, we argued, highlights the political imperative of the “turn to the world” in addressing this gap in global film culture, film studies, and other humanities-based disciplines. ![]() Upon completing the manuscript of World Cinema: A Critical Introduction, we noted the discord between the cosmopolitan spirit of world cinema and the parochial political forces shaping reality. ![]() Keywords: world cinema transnational political imperative ![]()
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