This line of research builds on the study of cinema as a sociocultural phenomenon. Prioritizing a transnational, decolonial, gender, and interdisciplinary perspective, we analyze the circulation of cultural goods, mediators, and all manner of actants in Latour’s terms using networks of exchange that extend beyond cultural, disciplinary, and geographic borders. We understand that the history of film needs to be deconstructed, so that we may finally come to value the roles of those actants (objects, quasi-objects, quasi-subjects, and subjects) that have been marginalized in the modern construction of Global North history. As such, we wield empirical, situated, and de-essentialized knowledge, understanding film as a broad phenomenon that is transgressed by networks of global exchange.

As such, we apply a decentered, politically and ethically accountable perspective to film histories to unearth the role that women of the Global South, along with other invisibilized actants, have played in the establishment of various transnational film cultures. Within a relational approach, we aim to use digital methods and a large-scale analysis in order to create networks and databases that we can make available digitally in turn. Likewise, tools and methods from different disciplines, such as literature, translation, other art forms, and anthropology, will prove key to this analysis, reconstruction, and rewriting of different film histories from multiple perspectives.