Call For Contributors: Critique, Revolution, and Liberation in Film

The last few years in film brought viewers not only great stories and performances, but also presented sophisticated social critiques and invited audiences to imagine the possibilities of alternative worlds. The reparations and retributive violence set around the Tulsa Massacre of HBO’s Watchmen, for example, ask us to consider how we might create a just future grounded in a reckoning with America’s racist past. The dating violence and predation in the three seasons of You on Netflix, meanwhile, take aim at the relationship between technology, gender, culture, and oppression. Together, they illustrate the power of social critique in film that transcends genre.

For our Spring 2022 issue, The Activist History Review invites essays that consider how film—spanning genres from documentary and drama to comedy, science fiction, and fantasy—can help us critique systems of oppression and imagine egalitarian alternatives.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Analyses of specific movies, shorts, and television series.
• Examinations of trends in genre, topic, or form.
• Film as a vehicle for critique.
• The entertainment industr(ies) as workspaces.
• Illustrating and imagining systems of oppression.
• Art and abolition.
• Lessons in liberation from film history.

Proposals should be no more than 250 words for articles from 1250-2000 words, and should be emailed to horne(dot)activisthistory(at)gmail(dot)com by Friday, April 8th at 11:59 PM. Please also include a short bio of no more than 100 words.