In recent years, there has been a growing acknowledgement among cultural critics and media scholars of the unxpected power wielded by popular culture originating from the Global South. This media output, increasingly consumed worldwide, has emerged as a formidable force, often challenging the dominance of Hollywood an other entertainment giants of the Global North. However, can we construct longer genealogies to challenge this new understanding of global media circuits, their origins, continuities, ruptures, as well as the politics and ideologies embedded within the global-popular today?

This talk will explore this question through two historical case studies that seek to reconceptualize our discipline’s accounts of the geographies and infrastructures of global media circulation.

Masha Salazkina is Professor of Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is the author of Romancing Yesenia: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture (forthcoming: University of California Press, 2024) and World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities and Soildarities in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2023). She co-edited the book Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures (Indiana University Press, 2020).