1st Edition
Cosmopolitan Aspirations in Contemporary Cinema
This book presents cosmopolitanism as a useful methodological approach to understand the transnational synergies present in contemporary cinema.
In line with existing literature from the social sciences, the volume aims to contribute to the ‘cosmopolitan turn’ in cinema studies. It considers cosmopolitanism as, among others, a personal and social aspiration of social justice, world citizenship and celebration of difference; a notion to be criticised as elitist, Western, often imperialist, and homogenising; and an actually existing social practice characterised by contradiction, messiness and conflict. The chapters in this volume offer insights into the variety of sometimes contradictory discourses that arise from a cosmopolitan interpretation of a wide variety of film texts. Key topics explored in this book include borders, (im)mobilities, migration, race, class and film aesthetics.
This book will be particularly useful to film studies scholars and students looking at transnational, global, world and decolonial cinemas and focusing on topics like borders, migration and multiculturalism in film. This book will also appeal to academic communities studying media, literature, mobilities, geopolitics, sociology and the social sciences in general.
Introduction
The Good, the Bad and the Real: The Many Faces of the Cosmopolitan
María del Mar Azcona and Celestino Deleyto
Utopian Cosmopolitanism
1. Towards Maturity through Cosmopolitan Attempts in Party Girl (1995) and God’s Own Country (2017)
Andrea Regueira Martín
2. Seeing from the Border: Cosmopolitan Solidarity in Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
3. Africanisms and the Western Worldview: The Cosmopolitics of Marvel’s Black Panther (2018)
Hervé Mayer
Critical Cosmopolitanism
4. Metropolis as Cosmopolis in Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
5. A Cosmopolitan Hero? Agent 007, Black Cosmopolitan Voodoo-Practitioners and the Globalisation of Western Cultural Images in Live and Let Die (1973)
6. Cosmopolitanism or Carnage (2011)
Andrés Bartolomé
7. Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007) through a Cosmopolitan Lens: India with A French Flavour
Julie Assouly
Everyday Cosmopolitanism
8. Aspirationally Cosmopolitan: Singapore as Cultural Imaginary in 7 Letters (2015) and Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
Felicia Chan
9. Different Ways of Being No One: Cosmopolitanisms in Manu Riche’s Problemski Hotel (2015)
Bram Van Beek
10. Cosmopolitan (Non-)Cinema: Impurity, Recognition and Hospitality in The Cambridge Squatter (2016)
Humberto Saldanha
Biography
María del Mar Azcona teaches English and Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza. She is the author of The Multi-Protagonist Film (2010), Alejandro González Iñárritu, co-written with Celestino Deleyto (2010) and Before Sunrise (2023), also co-written with Celestino Deleyto. Among her articles are “Matt Damon: A Cosmopolitan Hero for the Mainstream” (Celebrity Studies 2018) and “The Trickster and the Fool: Matt Damon and Comedy” (Quarterly Review of Film and Video 2021).
Julia Echeverría is Lecturer in English and Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza. Her research focuses on film genre theory, specifically digital cinema, virality and the representation of space. She is the author of Epidemic Cinema: The Rise of a Genre (2024).
Pablo Gómez-Muñoz is Lecturer in English and Film at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). His research interests are transnational cinema, science fiction, space, borders, cosmopolitanism and precarity. He is the author of Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Futures, Cosmopolitan Concerns (2023).
