The annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association took place on April 1–4, 2010 in New Orleans, Louisiana attracting over 2,000 scholars from around the world. Using the Hotel Monteleone as its official conference base, seminars were organised across New Orleans at the hotels Astor, Bienville and Monteleone, as well as Arnaud's Restaurant in the French Quarter. A number of the panels focused on the subject of contemporary cinema and the visual arts. The panels from which the papers in this volume were assembled were: ‘Being-in-the-World: Chinese Cinema and its Cosmopolitan Perspectives’, ‘Berlin's Imagined Geographies’, ‘Just Memory: Utopian Fiction and Abraxian History’, ‘National Traumas, Diasporic Encounters: Violence, Memory, and Literary/Visual Culture’, ‘Post/colonial Film: Imaging Identity and Resistance’, ‘Made in Hong Kong: Language, Literature and Film from a City in Search of Itself ’, ‘Affectivity and Aesthetics of the Postnational across Literature, Cinema, and Theory’, ‘Comparative Literature: From Practice to Theory’, ‘Reading Between the Arts: Multi-Media, Aisthesis, and Interart Studies’, ‘Intermediality after 1900’, ‘Re-defining art: Artistic genres in literary works’, and ‘The Hidden Voice: Cross-Cultural Women's Autobiographical Novels’.

Following the conference, and thanks to the assistance of the principal conference organiser, Dr Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, a call for papers was facilitated, from which the editor selected the best abstracts thematically for their relevance to contemporary cinema and the visual arts, and these consisted of the most excellently written and most suitable taking into account principally three criteria: argument, structure and theme.