Description: "Discourses of cult cinema primarily centre around the West, with a particular emphasis upon Anglo-American cinema and fandom. Meanwhile, scholarship on world cinema privileges art cinema traditions and downplays those areas of popular cinema that intersect with cult. Bringing together an international group of scholars whose chapters range from studies of film reception that trace the international spread of cult film practices through to accounts of cult filmmaking traditions from a diverse range of film cultures, Global Cult Cinemas makes a decisive intervention by addressing the transnational dynamics underpinning cult cinema and works towards the goal of de-Westernizing the discipline"-- Provided by publisher.
Brief description: Iain Robert Smith is author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (2016) and co-editor of the collections Transnational Film Remakes (2017) and Media Across Borders (2016). He co-founded the SCMS Transnational Cinemas SIG and he is currently working on a monograph on cult traditions within Indian cinema.
Review Quotes: "Through its ambitious curatorial framework and critical impulse to re-conceptualize transnationalism and decolonization with nuance and rigour, Global Cult Cinemas makes a crucial intervention that contests normative geopolitics of canonization in Anglophone film studies. The contributors' diverse critical rapport with the core concepts of film studies (e.g. authorship, cultural translation, extraction, fandom, genre, Indigeneity, racialization, post-coloniality, and spectatorship) opens new theoretical paradigms to re-locate cult film in and out of the field's canonizing drives. Moving beyond the institutionally driven, critically shallow, and culturalist agendas of decolonization, the editors treat the complexities of knowledge production with great enthusiasm and care." --Cüneyt Çakirlar, Associate Professor of Film and Visual Culture, Nottingham Trent University, UK, and editor of Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics (2025)