The studies in Transnational Crime Cinema demonstrate that crime films are a primary discursive site in which cinema reflects upon the role of cinema in social transformation: moments in which film becomes an agent active in social, political and economic structures. Chapters in this volume spotlight crime as cinema’s channeling of, and challenge to, the established orders of morality that lie beyond the terms of visual representation. With a plurality of aesthetic, stylistic and narrative markers, crime in cinema appears through a matrix of evolving genres, and genre appears in crime films as a key register in cinema’s engagement with the processes of its own social discursivity – making this engagement marked and legible. Contributors to this collection each analyse productions of local and national cinema industries across the world in which crime is the feature attraction to bring into view the transnationality of political and economic processes that shape contemporary social realities. These studies, thus, extend beyond a treatment of crime films that merely maps genre or genre cycles. Taking genealogical approaches to the study of popular genre cinema they open the transformations of social and historical discourse to closer examination. Such an approach combines the analysis of ideological and commodity forms established within (but also at times rupturing) globalised capital that Jonathan Risner identifies in this volume as the ‘emotive’ and ‘affective’ (a formulation that contrasts shifting sites of consciousness in body, language and experience with the unconscious or semi-conscious registers of affect).

Establishing sightlines on key cinematic works in which these discourses become active sites in the interrogation of the limits of national ideology and the national imaginary, the conceptual framework of this volume anchors critical concepts of transnationalism in bodily/inscriptive terms, in political terms and in economic terms. The chapters in this collection constitute genealogies of transnational bodies: rendered onscreen (and the bodies of the audience that encounter onscreen bodies in moments of crisis) in, or resisting, processes of linguistic and social inscription (especially as gender is absorbed into conventions of genre); in moments of conscription within economic structures; and in processes that weld politics to individual and collective affect.