Julia Echeverria – författare

This book examines the recent trend in global cinema to feature infectious disease.

As the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic materialised the anxieties and discourses of world risk that had long been portrayed in popular media, the book provides a novel definition of the epidemic film genre and offers a systematic look into the narrative and stylistic conventions that characterise it. Epidemic Cinema traces the evolution of the genre from its early cinematic origins to establish the founding principles of a genre standing at the crossroads between science-fiction and horror. It draws on close textual analysis to show how the pandemic reified one of the central predicaments of epidemic narratives: the constant tension existing between free-floating phenomena and the impulse to control and resist such phenomena, ultimately epitomised by the trope of the border. Showing how infectious diseases offer a rich allegorical frame which cinema uses to articulate timely anxieties of growingly invisible and deterritorialised risks, the author presents the prevalence of contagion in popular culture as a symptom of this growingly viral and virus-ridden context, both in its most literal and metaphorical sense.

This insightful study will interest students and scholars of film studies, global cinema, science-fiction, horror, popular culture and genre theory.

This book examines the recent trend in global cinema to feature infectious disease.

As the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic materialised the anxieties and discourses of world risk that had long been portrayed in popular media, the book provides a novel definition of the epidemic film genre and offers a systematic look into the narrative and stylistic conventions that characterise it. Epidemic Cinema traces the evolution of the genre from its early cinematic origins to establish the founding principles of a genre standing at the crossroads between science-fiction and horror. It draws on close textual analysis to show how the pandemic reified one of the central predicaments of epidemic narratives: the constant tension existing between free-floating phenomena and the impulse to control and resist such phenomena, ultimately epitomised by the trope of the border. Showing how infectious diseases offer a rich allegorical frame which cinema uses to articulate timely anxieties of growingly invisible and deterritorialised risks, the author presents the prevalence of contagion in popular culture as a symptom of this growingly viral and virus-ridden context, both in its most literal and metaphorical sense.

This insightful study will interest students and scholars of film studies, global cinema, science-fiction, horror, popular culture and genre theory.

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.