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Religions
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Re-framing and Re-focusing Religion and Film in America
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Re-framing and Re-focusing Religion and Film in America

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444). This special issue belongs to the section "Religions and Humanities/Philosophies".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 May 2020) | Viewed by 3305

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Mark W. Graham

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
East Asian Studies, Religious Studies, South Asian Studies, College of Wooster, OH 44691, USA
Interests: religion & electronic media; religion & modern/contemporary literature; East Asian religions; religious diasporas and globalizations

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The focus of this Special Issue represents an intersection of two important areas of research in Religious Studies. The field of “American religion(s)” is a large, diverse, long-established, and primary sub-field of the discipline as a whole. “Religion and film” is of course more recent but now is also an internally diverse and well-established sub-field in the discipline. This Special Issue of Religions invites contributions from  scholars within and beyond Religious Studies. Contributors are encouraged to consider a wide range of possible intersections of these fields, both in terms of their ‘content’ (American religions, religion in American cultures, American films, film in America) and in terms of the histories and paradigms of their fields that structure questions around "American religions" and "religion and film". The aim of this Special Issue is, through the works contributed, to re-examine the frameworks that have focused attention on these sub-fields of Religious Studies and to open new directions of inquiry into disciplinary questions related to "Religion and Film in America". Scholars are encouraged to re-examine paradigmatic questions and materials and to introduce new materials and questions that might open new directions of inquiry into these fields. What materials and questions constitute the frameworks that bring into focus "American religions" or "religion(s) in America"? What materials and questions constitute the frameworks that bring into focus "religion and film" in an "American" context, or "American religion(s)" in the context of studying film? Can either of these be re-framed and re-focused by means of inquiry into the other? These questions are suggestions meant to invite thinking on this topic, without limiting the topic. Contributions may foreground broad disciplinary questions, as such questions help re-think the materials that constitute the disciplinary entities; alternatively, scholars may focus on specific works or materials (new or classic), as such materials help re-think the categories that have and continue to form these areas of inquiry.

Prof. Dr. Mark W. Graham
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • American religion
  • film
  • popular culture
  • media

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

14 pages, 276 KiB  
Article
Disney’s Reel Doubling of Violent Desire in J. J. Abrams’ Mimetic The Force Awakens
by John C. McDowell
Religions 2019, 10(11), 615; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10110615 - 6 Nov 2019
Viewed by 2862
Abstract
Abrams’ spectacularly distended infantilising manipulation of the saga embeds a form of cognitive resonance with a state of perpetual war and a politically thanatising mythos fitted out as a politically containing moment within what cultural commentators are referring to as “post-9/11 American cinema”, [...] Read more.
Abrams’ spectacularly distended infantilising manipulation of the saga embeds a form of cognitive resonance with a state of perpetual war and a politically thanatising mythos fitted out as a politically containing moment within what cultural commentators are referring to as “post-9/11 American cinema”, a form of cinema reacting to a cultural trauma and that normalises a hegemonic political reactivity in a perceived ‘clash of civilizations’ in “the social embodied” in an age marked by what Terry Eagleton describes as “holy terror”. As cultural philosopher Douglas Kellner argues, movies of apocalyptic or catastrophe cinema can “be read as allegories of the disintegration of social life and civil society, and the emergence of a Darwinian nightmare where the struggle for survival occurs in a Hobbesian world where life is nasty, brutish, and short.” The contention is that if George Lucas developed Star Wars to struggle with, among other things, an America that had elected Richard Nixon and engaged in the culturally traumatic Vietnam War, Abrams and his co-writer Lawrence Kazdan have relocated the franchise in a context marked as “post 9/11 cinema”. It is unclear quite how The Force Awakens could offer a distinctively interrogatory function for conceiving political subjectivity in the contemporary fractured and self-assertive space of global geopolitics, expressing, as it does, the classificatory coding that figures innocent selfhood in a conflictual relation with the evil terrorist other. Abrams’ movie, accordingly, is ill equipped to refuse to naturalise the innocence of the politically regulative messianic monomyth of the exceptionalist nation that instils a sensitivity conducive to violence against the foreigner when it is perceived to be under threat. It is, in other words, ill-equipped to resist being captured by the Girardian framing of myth within an identification of “sacred violence”. Consequently, The Force Awakens provides a resource for the critic’s reflections on the cultural difficulties of learning about our learning, of the disciplining of desire through monomythic intensification, and of sustaining reaction to cultural trauma through the hostility of sacrificial disposal of the other that requires the instrumentalised rationality of the self-secure national subject. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Re-framing and Re-focusing Religion and Film in America)
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