Teaching Transnational Cinema

This collection of essays offers a pioneering analysis of the political and conceptual complexities of teaching transnational cinema in university classrooms around the world. In their exploration of a wide range of films from different national and regional contexts, contributors reflect on the practical and pedagogical challenges of teaching about immigrant identities, transnational encounters, foreignness, cosmopolitanism and citizenship, terrorism, border politics, legality and race. Probing the value of cinema in interdisciplinary academic study and the changing strategies and philosophies of teaching in the university, this volume positions itself at the cutting edge of transnational film studies. Review: While the main crux of this text involves encounters with transnational cinema, and specifically how to ethically and non-violently facilitate these encounters in a classroom, Marciniak and Bennett's book can be used as a generative destabilisation of assumptions about the other , about the containability of knowledge-transfer, and about spectatorship in general. Moreover, the reflections offered in the book draw attention to one's relationship with oneself - a critical and ongoing reflection for any pedagogical or artistic experience. -Shabnam Piryaei, Sense of Cinema