Concepts of transnational cinema: towards a critical transnationalism in film studies

ABSTRACTThis article aims to map out the various concepts of transnational cinema that have appeared over the past ten to fifteen years, and its state of deployment, related issues and problematics. It argues for a critical form of transnationalism in film studies that might help us interpret more productively the interface between global and local, national and transnational. It also aims to move away from a Eurocentric approach towards the reading of such films. It will illustrate how the concept of transnational cinema has been at once useful and problematic, liberating and limiting, by focusing on two case studies—diasporic and postcolonial cinemas and Chinese and East Asian cinemas—that provide fertile ground for interrogating the concept of the transnational.