Seminar Overview:

This seminar invites papers that examine how Sinophone cinemas contribute to global cinematic discourses through the lens of the everyday: ordinary people, quotidian life, mundane routines, intimate relationship, unremarkable events, and the small-scale. Across Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, Southeast Asia, and diasporic communities, Sinophone filmmakers have long captured the textures, politics, and aesthetics of daily life.

Sinophone refers not only to films produced in Mandarin or other Sinitic languages, but also to a cross-regional cinematic framework shaped by linguistic heterogeneity, postcolonial histories, diasporic mobility, and intercultural interaction. Participants are invited to rethink how the everyday in Sinophone cinemas as a space where political tension, cultural experience, and aesthetic innovation converge.

This seminar poses the questions: What insights arise when attention turns from grand historical narratives to the ordinary spaces and temporalities of everyday life? How are experiences of work, family life, idleness, leisure, boredom, and endurance reimagined in Sinophone cinemas? What new possibilities for social critique, historical memory, and cultural expression emerge when Sinophone films focus on the everyday?

Suggested Topics (but not limited to):

Everyday Temporalities

Domestic Spaces

Working Lives

Urban and Rural Rhythms

Media and Technology

Memory and History

Margins and Minorities