Visualising Criminality: Crime and Films in the Global South
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Organization: IIT Dharwad
Call for Papers for the Edited Volume: Visualising Criminality: Crime and Films in the Global South
This proposed edited volume, Visualising Criminality: Crime and Films in the Global
South, will interrogate the complex relationship between crime, its cinematic representations,
and the diverse structural and institutional exigencies behind both across the heterogeneous
landscapes of the Global South. In recent times, crime cinema in the Global South has
emerged as a vital site of both cultural expression and critique, traversing regional and
national boundaries and engaging with communities and their experiential realities shaped by
colonial legacies, political-economic conflicts, state violence, wars, and rapid social
displacements, among others. Dealing with cinematic productions from regions such as Asia,
Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, this anthology aims to
underscore the ways in which films from these regions not only depict crimes but also,
through them, partake in the continuous negotiations of what Rafe McGregor has called
‘power, inequality, and harm’ within the context of the Global South.
As Lynn S. Chancer notes, across the varied issues that occupy social science, it is
crime that eludes any ‘one-dimensional’ approach; therefore, scholarship on crime and
criminality should promote methods that are ‘simultaneously ra-tionalistically and
emotionally attuned’ (130). However, historically, the predominant body of research on crime
has been overtly statistical and theory-driven, promoting studies of empirical criminal
activities. To address this issue, Nicole Hahn Rafter has envisioned an innovative approach to
criminological discourse in her seminal works, Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society
(2000) and Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture (2011) (with
Michelle Brown). Rafter and Brown’s method lies in bringing traditional criminological
theories to films, particularly to Global North films, in an effort that advances not only the
understanding of criminological theory but also promotes ‘the role of theory in culture and culture in theory’ (X). On the other hand, Rafe McGregor paves the way in the domain of critical criminology by incorporating literary theories and utilising a deconstructionist
methodology as a strategic intervention to simultaneously deconstruct and reconstruct
meaning and values centred on crime and criminality.
The significance of the above developments is manifold. First, it shows a discursive
shift from a traditional empiricist analysis to the introduction of the cultural and literary turn
in the criminology discourse. Nevertheless, such an epistemological shift in understanding
crime and criminality tends to secure an occidental approach with films from the Global
North as its case studies. Against this background, studying crime films in the Global South
has the potential to unpack new understandings of how films take on different hues based on
its engagements with local and transnational dimensions of crime—encompassing corruption,
gender-based crimes, state crimes, organised violence—while also focusing on the global
movements of power, capital, and media that substantially shape and influence the
contemporary realities of the Global South. Unlike the Euro-American genre-dominated
industry, the study of Global South films can contribute to the expanding Global South
scholarship by examining the aesthetics, politics, materiality, reception, and ethics of crime
cinema that often transcend categorical demarcations.
In this context, this proposed edited volume will contribute to both film studies and
criminology by theorising crime films from the Global South as not mere entertainment but
as cultural texts that participate in and mould the formation of cultural imaginaries and the
mediation of ethical paradoxes in a landscape with a constant need for decolonial
contextualised interventions. This study also reinforces the unique positionality of the Global
South with its variegated emotiveness, histories, cultural conventions, and cinematic
traditions. The proposed volume is also significant as it aims to study the visualisation of
crime on the silver screen, not as mere subtexts or symbolic placeholders. This volume departs from established frameworks of scholarship in popular criminology in two crucial ways. First, it emphasises the specificity of space in the Global South, arguing that the political economies of criminality, the corporeal experience of carcerality, the mechanism of
policing, and the means through which communities understand crime and transgressions are
all essentially local, though at the same time are architectured by the norms of globalisation.
Second, it repositions the crime films from the Global South as more than mere adaptations
of the Hollywood or European traditions. Be it the ‘township crime’ dramas of South Africa,
‘ghetto’ films of Nollywood, vigilante and gangster films of India, ‘neo-noir’ crime films
from China, yakuza films from Japan, gritty neo-noir crime genre from Taiwan, this volume
will explore how crime cinema from the Global South needs a pertinent and necessary
intervention owning to its politically imperative and aesthetically distinct corpus that deserves
a sustained scholarship of its own. Through an intersectional approach combining film
studies and cultural criminology with auteur, legal, postcolonial, reception, area, genre,
feminist, affect, and ecocritical studies, this edited volume contributes to and advances the
Global South scholarship by serving both as a foundational text as well as a provocation for
scholars to think critically about the role of films in shaping, contributing, and influencing the
notion of crime and justice by serving as a social critique and a space for negotiating
meanings and counter-meanings across both local and global scales.
Within this context, this volume welcomes submissions on crime and films in the Global
South. The contributors are encouraged to engage with conceptual frameworks ranging
from intersectional theoretical analysis to close textual readings. Suggested topics
include (but are not limited to) the followings:
- Gendered crimes in Global South cinema
- Genre, nation and crime films
- Censorship, state and criminality on screen
- Crime films, their reception, and the affective politics
- Green crimes, ecocide, and environmental narratives
- Spectacle and crime in Global South cinema
- Ethnographic storytelling, documentaries, marginal voices, and articulation of violence
- Globalisation and neo-capital narratives in Global South
- Crime, migration, and diasporic representation on screen
- Childhood, crime, and juvenile justice in Global South cinema
- Colonial past, postcolonial amnesia, and the cinematic narratives
- Digital platforms, the infotainment industry, and streaming true-crime narratives
- Criminal underworld, and cinematic representation of law and justice
Editors
- Dr. Ridhima Tewari, Associate Professor (English), Department of Humanities,
Economics, Arts and Rural Technologies (HEART), IIT Dharwad, Karnataka, India. - Mr. Tonmay Das, PhD Scholar, Department of Humanities, Economics, Arts and
Rural Technologies (HEART), IIT Dharwad, Karnataka, India.
Submission Guidelines
- Interested contributors are requested to submit their abstracts not exceeding 500
words (excluding references), 5–7 keywords, and a brief bio (100 words) to
crimefilmsglobalsouthcfp@gmail.com.** - Times New Roman, double-spaced, 12
- Chicago Manual of Style
Important Dates
- Abstract Submission Deadline: 30 June 2026
5 - Notification of Acceptance: 15 August 2026
- Complete details of the full paper submission will be conveyed upon acceptance
Publisher’s Details
We are in contact with a reputed international publisher for the proposed anthology. More
details will be conveyed via email.
**Please feel free to reach out to us at the following email address for any queries or
information: crimefilmsglobalsouthcfp@gmail.com or at (+91) 9748822321. The aim and
scope of this volume is to engage with films that are situated within and beyond the
boundaries of South Asia as well. Contributors are therefore also encouraged to engage with
films originating from various parts of the Global South.
References
Chancer, Lynn S. “Cultural criminology: A retrospective and prospective review.” Annual
Review of Criminology, vol. 7, no. 1, 2024, pp. 129–142.
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-081123-084506.
McGregor, Rafe. Literary Theory and Criminology, Routledge, 2024.
Rafter, Nicole Hahn, and Michelle Brown. Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory
and Popular Culture. New York UP, 2011.
Rafter, Nicole Hahn. Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society. Oxford UP, 2000.
crimefilmsglobalsouthcfp@gmail.com
Tonmay Das