VOL. 02, N. 1, MAY–JUNE 2027: CALL FOR ESSAYS

BLACKOUT
Cinema and Other Visions

 

Biannual journal of film, media and visual studies

 

BLACKOUT is an open-access digital academic journal dedicated to film studies, media studies, television studies, visual studies, and game studies. The journal was created as an interdisciplinary space for the critical analysis of contemporary images, audiovisual cultures, and media transformations. Published by the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples through the OJS platform, BLACKOUT promotes a dialogue between cinema, media, visual arts, and contemporary digital practices.

 

 

CALL FOR ESSAYS

 

BLACKOUT. Cinema and Other Visions

Vol. 02, No. 1 (May–June 2027) – Section: Focus On

 

SHORT CUTS OF AMERICA

Images, Perspectives and Cultures of the United States Between Past Memories and Future Visions

 

Edited by Diego Del Pozzo

 

 

Thanks to the strength of its cultural industries and their extraordinary capacity for international circulation, the United States of America has occupied a central position in the global imagination since the beginning of the twentieth century. Art forms, means of communication, and modes of expression deeply connected to technological and industrial development – including cinema, comics, popular literature, recorded music, television, advertising, and video games – have played a decisive role over the decades in constructing and disseminating images of America and the American way of life, both within and, above all, beyond the country’s borders. But what kind of America do these images portray today? And, more importantly, what kind of America emerges when images of the present are viewed through the memory of the past and through the possibilities, or fears, of an increasingly uncertain and less decipherable future?

In today’s historical moment, characterized by profound political, social, cultural, economic, and technological transformations, the United States provides an even more privileged vantage point from which to investigate the relationship between the collective imagination, popular culture, and social reality. Under Donald Trump’s second presidency in particular, public debate appears to be shaped by intense tensions surrounding national identity, ethnicity, migration, inequality, the relationship between centre and periphery, gender and generational issues, freedom of expression, transformations in the world of work, the role of digital technologies and artificial intelligence, the crisis and transformation of media ecosystems, and the relationship between citizens, institutions, and the forms and tools of communication. American society in recent years has been traversed by complex political and cultural fractures and is increasingly characterized by a polarization that cannot be explained solely in terms of the rigid opposition between two political and ideological camps. It must also be examined through increasingly pronounced differences in values, identities, social affiliations, cultural orientations, and media consumption practices. In this context, popular culture is no longer simply a mirror of society; it is also a space in which American society itself is continually imagined, negotiated and renegotiated, contested, simplified, mythologized, and reinvented.

Cinema, in particular, has historically been one of the privileged arenas through which contemporary America has constructed its own self-representation: from the myth of the frontier to the development of metropolitan areas; from the American Dream to its crisis and questioning; from the celebration of national power to the acknowledgement of images of marginalization and exclusion; from representations of war and military power projected beyond national borders to reflections on their domestic consequences and on the forms of violence that run through American society; and from narratives of family and work to the transformations of individual and collective identities in an age marked by the crisis of grand narratives, digital technologies, and growing uncertainty about the distinction between fiction and reality. This function, however, is not exclusive to cinema. Television and streaming, serial storytelling, comics, popular music, music videos, video games, podcasts, social media, advertising, and all other forms of audiovisual and popular culture now participate in an increasingly complex and interconnected system in which images of America circulate, intersect, and continually transform.

The very notion of “American popular culture” is becoming increasingly difficult to trace back to a unified system. The multiplication of platforms, the fragmentation of audiences, recommendation algorithms, and the growing personalization of consumption have helped transform a previously more shared cultural space into a constellation of different communities, niches, and audiences. The processes of political polarization, particularly pronounced today, must likewise be considered in relation to changes in cultural and media consumption, within a historical and social context in which the relationship between entertainment, identity, and political affiliation is developing in entirely new ways.

Against this background, BLACKOUT. Cinema and Other Visions proposes a dossier on the United States of America for the Focus On section of its 2027 issue 1 (Vol. 02, No. 1). The title Short Cuts of America. Images, Perspectives, and Cultures of the United States Between Past Memories and Future Visions seeks to highlight two of the most compelling characteristics of American cinema and popular culture: their ability to continually rework the past and their use of the future to tell stories about the present. One need only consider the veritable archives of the national imagination that narrative genres such as the western, film noir, the gangster film, melodrama, the war film, horror, science fiction, and many others have constructed over time, continually redefining themselves through successive updates, reuses, and transformations. The past thus returns in the present, particularly in cinema and audiovisual media, in the form of remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels, franchises, adaptations, archival footage, nostalgia, retrofuturism, and revisions of collective memory. At the same time, however, the future is often already present in American images: in dystopias, science fiction, post-apocalyptic narratives, depictions of artificial intelligence as an increasingly difficult force to control, automated cities, ecological crises, transformations in the world of work, and new forms of surveillance and control.

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow can therefore coexist within the same image. This Focus On aims to investigate precisely these temporal and cultural overlaps.

 

Possible perspectives

This Call for Essays welcomes interdisciplinary contributions that keep images, narratives, cultural practices, and media systems at the centre of their analysis, including those adopting historical, sociological, anthropological, political science, and economic perspectives. Authors are invited to engage with one or more of the following thematic areas, which are intended as examples rather than an exhaustive list.

 

1. American cinema and the image of America

·      Cinema as a nation’s self-representation;

·      Transformations of the American myth;

·      Hollywood and the national imagination;

·      The “Runaway American Dream”;

·      Representations of power, wealth, and poverty;

·      Work, consumption, and social mobility;

·      Family, community, and individualism;

·      Cities, peripheries, suburbs, and small towns;

·      The myth of the frontier;

·      The relationship between centre and margins;

·      Independent cinema and alternative representations of America;

·      New geographies of American cinema.

 

2. America, memory, and history in contemporary audiovisual media

·      The Civil War and the memory of slavery;

·      Segregation and the Civil Rights Movement;

·      Vietnam;

·      Watergate;

·      The Cold War;

·      Reaganomics and the 1980s;

·      September 11, 2001, and the New World Order;

·      Wars in the Middle East;

·      Economic crises;

·      Presidential memory;

·      Representations of recent history;

·      Revisionism and counter-memories;

·      Nostalgia and retromania;

·      Remakes, reboots, and new forms of audiovisual memory;

·      From the American Dream to the American Scream: popular culture and the audiovisual industry in the age of Trump.

 

3. Polarization, conflict, and popular culture

·      Representations of political polarization;

·      Progressive and conservative cultures;

·      Culture Wars;

·      Political identities and cultural identities;

·      Representations of social conflict;

·      Media and belonging;

·      Celebrity and politics;

·      Entertainment and political communication;

·      Cinema and propaganda;

·      Television and news;

·      Political satire;

·      Meme culture and digital culture;

·      Social media and new imaginaries.

 

4. Representing America’s multiple identities

·      Black cinema and Black popular culture;

·      African American representation;

·      Indigenous representation;

·      Asian American cinema;

·      Latinx/Latine cultures;

·      Immigration and diaspora;

·      Multiculturalism;

·      Whiteness;

·      Representations of class;

·      Intersections of ethnicity, gender, and class;

·      Memory and identity;

·      Cultural appropriation;

·      New forms of representation and self-representation.

 

5. Gender, the body, and sexuality in audiovisual media and pop culture

·      Femininity and masculinity;

·      The body and identity;

·      Motherhood and fatherhood;

·      Sexuality;

·      LGBTQIA+ communities;

·      Transgender representation;

·      New forms of celebrity;

·      Body politics;

·      Gender-based violence;

·      Work and gender;

·      Transformations of family models.

 

6. Television, streaming, and new forms of serial storytelling

·      The Network Era;

·      Cable television;

·      Prestige television;

·      Contemporary serial storytelling;

·      Streaming platforms and convergent television;

·      Binge-watching;

·      Audience fragmentation;

·      Sitcoms and dramedies;

·      Crime and political dramas;

·      Reality television;

·      Talk shows;

·      Late-night television;

·      Television and national identity;

·      The age of algorithms;

·      Transformations in the television industry in the third millennium.

 

7. Comics, graphic novels, comic-book adaptations, and transmedia storytelling

·      From pulp magazines to comic books;

·      Superheroes and national identity;

·      Marvel and DC Comics;

·      Superheroism and militarism;

·      Villains and social anxieties;

·      Underground comics;

·      The rise of the graphic novel;

·      Comics culture;

·      Ethnic and gender representations;

·      Adaptations across comics, cinema, and television;

·      The age of comic-book movies;

·      Transmedia universes and narrative ecosystems;

·      Superhero revisionism and the crisis of the idea of heroism;

·      Contemporary transformations and new frontiers.

 

8. Pop music, rock, and American sonic identities

·      Country and folk;

·      Soul, jazz, rhythm and blues;

·      Rock ‘n’ roll and the emergence of teenagers as a cultural group;

·      Pop;

·      The American music industry;

·      Popular music, cinema, and television;

·      Counterculture, rock, and youth protest;

·      Hip-hop, rap, and urban cultures;

·      Punk and metal, antagonism and anger;

·      MTV and the age of the music video;

·      Celebrity culture;

·      Concerts, performance, and the artist’s body;

·      New identities, class conflicts, and generational gaps;

·      Music and political engagement.

 

9. Horror, science fiction, dystopia, and the apocalypse

·      The popular culture industry of fear;

·      Horror and social anxieties;

·      Invasion narratives;

·      From classic monsters to the ubiquitous zombie;

·      Epidemics and pandemics;

·      Climate fiction, natural disasters, and ecological futures;

·      The post-apocalyptic in cinema and television series;

·      Technological dystopias;

·      From robots to artificial intelligence;

·      The poetics and politics of surveillance and militarization;

·      The crisis of civilization and the fear of social collapse.

 

10. Representations of war, violence, and security

·      War and cinema;

·      The trauma of Vietnam, both inside and outside the nation’s borders;

·      Iraq and Afghanistan;

·      September 11, 2001, and the global war on terror;

·      The war genre in television, comics, and video games;

·      Policing and militarization;

·      Guns and American culture;

·      Vigilante cinema;

·      Urban violence;

·      The memory of conflicts;

·      Representations of the enemy.

 

11. New technologies, digital visions, and artificial intelligence

·      Artificial intelligence and cinema;

·      Algorithms and images;

·      Generative AI;

·      Automation and robotics;

·      Virtual and augmented reality;

·      Video games and convergent culture;

·      Digital surveillance;

·      Platforms and data culture;

·      Military technologies;

·      Transformations in creative work;

·      Authorship in the age of artificial intelligence;

·      Convergent cinema and transmedia narratives.

 

12. The cultural industry and transformations in Hollywood

·      The studio system;

·      Contemporary Hollywood;

·      The streaming wars;

·      Franchises;

·      Blockbusters;

·      Media conglomerates;

·      Transformations in the film market;

·      The crisis of theatrical exhibition;

·      New forms of distribution;

·      Film festivals;

·      Independent cinema;

·      Unions and labour in the audiovisual industry;

·      Production conditions amid strikes and professional transformations;

·      Platforms and new industrial models.

 

13. America beyond America

·      Americanization and anti-Americanism;

·      Hollywood as a global industry;

·      The transnational circulation of genres;

·      Remakes and adaptations;

·      Co-productions;

·      The export of cultural models;

·      Images of America in Italian and European cinema;

·      Soft power;

·      American studies and transnational cinema.

 

Beyond the present

Although the dossier focuses on the contemporary period, it does not aim to limit itself to reporting on present-day America. On the contrary, one of the Call’s objectives is to attract contributions that connect the present with the historical genealogies that have shaped it and with the future scenarios that contemporary images appear to anticipate.

American cinema, in fact, has often functioned as a kind of time machine, capable of recovering the past in order to interpret the present or imagining the future in order to explore the anxieties of its own time. Accordingly, the dossier also welcomes studies addressing phenomena that may appear distant from current affairs but are nevertheless capable of establishing a meaningful relationship with the transformations of contemporary America.

 

Approaches and methodologies

The Call does not seek to privilege any single methodology. Contributions employing, among others, the following theoretical approaches are therefore welcome:

·      Film analysis;

·      Media studies;

·      Television studies;

·      Visual culture studies;

·      Cultural studies;

·      American studies;

·      Popular culture studies;

·      Star studies;

·      Genre studies;

·      Audience and reception studies;

·      Production studies;

·      Political economy;

·      Transmedia studies;

·      Gender studies;

·      Race and ethnicity studies;

·      Memory studies;

·      Archival studies;

·      Digital humanities;

·      Sociological and anthropological approaches;

·      Interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives.

Particular interest will be given to contributions that bring the analysis of form into dialogue with historical, social, cultural, and political dimensions, avoiding both the reduction of audiovisual works to mere sociological documents and, conversely, purely formal analyses detached from the contexts in which works are produced and experienced.

 

Ten suggested references

The following short bibliography is intended solely as an initial guide to the themes of this Focus On and as a stimulus for engagement with further theoretical and critical perspectives, including interdisciplinary ones:

·      Baudrillard Jean, Amérique, Grasset, Paris 1986 (Italian trans. America, SE, Milan 2000);

·      Brunetta Gian Piero (ed.), Storia del cinema mondiale, Volume II: Gli Stati Uniti (Tomes I and II), Einaudi, Turin 2000;

·      Cullen Jim, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2003;

·      De Gaetano Roberto, La scena americana. Filosofia, letteratura, cinema, Mimesis, Milan–Udine 2025;

·      King Geoff, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction, Columbia University Press, New York 2002 (Italian trans. La nuova Hollywood. Dalla rinascita degli anni sessanta all’era del blockbuster. Einaudi, Turin 2004);

·      La Polla Franco, Sogno e realtà americana nel cinema di Hollywood, updated edition, Il Castoro, Milan 2004;

·      Menarini Roy, Il cinema dopo il cinema. Dieci idee sul cinema americano 2001–2010, Le Mani, Recco–Genoa 2010;

·      Sklar Robert, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, revised and updated edition, Vintage Books, New York 1994 (Italian trans. of the 1975 first edition: Cinemamerica. Una storia sociale del cinema americano, Feltrinelli, Milan 1982);

·      Steinbeck John, America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction, Penguin, New York 2003 (Italian trans. L’America e gli americani e altri scritti, Alet Edizioni, Padua 2008);

·      Zagarrio Vito, Storie americane. Il cinema di Hollywood dalle origini a oggi, Carocci, Rome 2025.

 

Abstract submissions

Proposals must include:

·      A provisional title for the contribution;

·      A short abstract of approximately 1,000–1,500 characters, including spaces;

·      Essential bibliographical references (no more than five);

·      Five keywords;

·      A short author biography of approximately 500 characters, including spaces;

·      ORCID, if available.

Proposals may be submitted in Italian or English.

Proposals will be evaluated by the dossier editor and the journal’s editorial team. Acceptance of a proposal does not automatically entail acceptance of the full article. Authors of accepted proposals will subsequently be invited to submit their complete contributions, which will then undergo anonymous peer review in accordance with BLACKOUT’s editorial policies.

 

Final contributions

Articles should be approximately 40,000–50,000 characters in length, including spaces and footnotes, in accordance with the editorial guidelines for BLACKOUT’s Focus On section.

Contributions must be original, previously unpublished, and not under simultaneous consideration by other journals. They may be written in Italian or English.

Articles may include images, film stills, photographs, posters, archival materials, and other illustrative material, provided that the necessary information and, where required, the relevant reproduction permissions are supplied.

Contributions will be published in Open Access in accordance with the journal’s editorial policy.

 

Deadlines

·      Wednesday, 2 December 2026: Proposal submission deadline;

·      Monday, 7 December 2026: Notification of proposal selection results;

·      Monday, 8 March 2027: Full article submission deadline;

·      Monday, 3 May 2027: Peer-review results;

·      Monday, 10 May 2027: Submission of articles requiring minor revisions;

·      Monday, 17 May 2027: Submission of articles requiring major revisions;

·      Monday, 7 June 2027: Journal publication.

 

How to submit a proposal

Proposals must be submitted exclusively through BLACKOUT’s Open Journal Systems platform. Authors must register or log in to their author account before submitting.

 

Journal website

BLACKOUT. Cinema e altre visioni: https://blackout.abana.it.

 

Code of Ethics

BLACKOUT adheres to the principles of editorial and scientific ethics promoted by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE: https://publicationethics.org/) and guarantees compliance with the following five fundamental principles:

1. Honesty and transparency: Published articles must be original and must not have been previously published or submitted to other journals. Authors must explicitly declare their methodologies, sources, and references. Any conflicts of interest must be declared upon submission.

2. Impartiality and independence of the peer review process: Articles submitted to the journal will be evaluated through a double-blind peer review process, in which neither the authors nor the reviewers are aware of each other's identities. Reviewers will be selected based on criteria of expertise in the article's field of expertise. The editorial board is committed to ensuring a review free of bias based on gender, ethnicity, political orientation, or institutional affiliation.

3. Anti-plagiarism and respect for intellectual property: All articles will be checked for plagiarism using specialized software. Authors must guarantee that they own the rights to any images, quotations, or audiovisual materials included in their essays. The journal encourages the use of Creative Commons for content sharing while respecting copyright.

4. Open access and dissemination of knowledge: BLACKOUT adopts an open access model at no cost to authors or readers, promoting the free dissemination of research. Content will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, allowing free sharing with mandatory attribution. The journal promotes the sharing of scientific knowledge as a common good, accessible to all.

5. Respect for Diversity and Inclusion: The journal is committed to fostering a diversity of academic perspectives, welcoming contributions from researchers from diverse geographical and institutional backgrounds. BLACKOUT encourages the publication of articles that address issues related to gender studies, postcolonialism, and representations of diversity in the media. Inclusive and respectful academic language is promoted, avoiding discriminatory or marginalizing expressions.

In the event of controversies and/or ethical issues (plagiarism, conflicts of interest, unethical behavior, etc.), the journal's editors will initiate an internal investigation following COPE guidelines. If necessary, measures will be taken, including retraction of the article and suspension or exclusion of the authors involved from future publications.