Exotic Cinema wins the 2023 Janovics Center Award for Best Book

We are delighted to share the news that Exotic Cinema: Encounters with Cultural Difference in Contemporary Transnational Film by Daniela Berghahn has won the 2023 Janovics Center Award for Best Book.

Details on the award and related events will be available on the Center’s website shortly.

Here's what Daniela had to say:

"I am absolutely thrilled to have won this prestigious award. I hope that the jury’s commendations will make more readers curious to find out what it genuinely new about decentred exoticism in transnational cinema."

Here's what the judges had to say:

"The Jury commends the monograph as an outstanding example of transnational film studies research, which analyzes many films from various continents and regions of the globe. Berghahn's meticulous scholarship, comprehensive writing, and well-constructed argument are praised for decentering concepts such as the exotic and exoticism, inviting readers to rethink them. The book moves away from the received wisdom of exoticism, too often coupled with orientalism and colonial power, and offers an original and insightful look at what the notion means today. With a profound understanding of the literature in her field, Berghahn offers a courageous critical reassessment of the aesthetic strategies and cultural value of exoticism against competing concepts describing cross-cultural encounters, such as orientalism, colonialism, primitivism, imperialism, and cultural appropriation. Her case studies are meticulously discussed and offer a multifaceted picture not just of individual films but also of their production context and reception."

More on the award:

The Janovics Center Award for Outstanding Humanities Research in Transnational Film and Theatre Studies is yearly awarded to publications that advance transnational research in the fields of film and theatre studies and employ innovative methods in the humanities. The Juries awarding these works were composed of Professors Agnieszka Rasmus from the University of Lodz, Professor Francesco Pitassio from the University of Udine, and Constantin Parvulescu, director of the Janovics Center (for film studies); and Professor Andriej Moskwin from the University of Warsaw, Professor Ileana Marin from the University of Wasington, and Miruna Runcan, director of the Janovics Center (for theatre studies).

More on the book:

Exotic Cinema is the first systematic analysis of decentred exoticism in contemporary transnational and world cinema. By critically examining regimes of visuality such as the imperial, the ethnographic and the exotic gaze, which have colonised our minds and ways of looking, Daniela Berghahn makes an important contribution to the urgent agenda of decolonising film studies.

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