Screening Solidarity

Neoliberalism and Transnational Cinemas

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by Helga Druxes

Type

Studies

Subject

Sociology

Keywords

social aspects

Publishing date

2024

Publisher

Bloomsbury Academic

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 256 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

979-8-7651-0140-7

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Book Presentation:
Western neoliberalism is a predatory outgrowth of late capitalism that overvalues competition, transferring the laws of the market to human relationships. This book advances the argument that anti-neoliberal cinemas of Europe, the United States, and the Russian Federation imagine and visualize alternatives to the non-sovereign realities of a neoliberal workplace that unequivocally endorses dangerous risk-taking, self-optimizing neoliberal subjects, and corporate ‘entrepreneurs of self.’ Always at stake in the examination of neoliberalism’s consequences is a human being who is indexed by race, gender, nation, ability, and economic performance. Drawing on film theory, transnational social histories, critical race theory, and Marxist and Foucauldian interpretive models, this book rediscovers a cinema that imagines a social contract focused on the common good and ethical standards for the social state. Anti-neoliberal cinema empowers the viewer as agentive through narratives that detail resistance to Western neoliberal modes of living and working. These filmmakers dramatize the labor of making solidarity across different groups.

About the Author:
Helga Druxes is Paul H. Hunn '55 Professor in Social Studies, emerita, in the Department of German and Russian at Williams College, USA. With Patricia A. Simpson, she published an edited volume Digital Media Strategies of the Far Right Across Europe and the United States (2015), an edited volume on Navid Kermani (2016), and articles on migration film, and recent German fiction about exile and memory.Alexandar Mihailovic is Visiting Professor of Literature at Bennington College and Professor emeritus of Russian and Comparative Literature at Hofstra University, USA. His books include: Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin's Theology of Discourse (1997), The Mitki and the Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia (2018; updated Russian translation, 2021), and the forthcoming Illiberal Vanguard: Populist Elitism in the United States and Russia (2023).ALEXANDAR MIHAILOVIC is Associate Professor of Russian at Hofstra University. An expert on Russian literature, he has written extensively on the subject, including Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin's Theology of Discourse.Patricia A. Simpson is Professor of German Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. Her most recent book is The Play World: Texts, Toys, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (2020). Other books include: Reimagining the European Family: Cultures of Immigration (2013), Cultures of Violence in the New German Street (2011) and is co-editor, with Elisabeth Krimmer, of Realities and Fantasies of German Female Leadership: From Maria Antonia of Saxony to Angela Merkel (2019).

Press Reviews:
"Refreshingly utopian in its aims but never naive, Screening Solidarity travels the globe to show that the liberatory possibilities promised by early cinema were never entirely abandoned; in their critique of hegemonic neoliberalism, the films discussed in this book remind us always to look for an alternative." ―Eliot Borenstein, Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies, New York University, USA

"This book explores narratives of solidaristic resistance to the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. The project is urgent and topical, as neoliberal capitalism is a defining feature of today's world that is furthering many global problems including wealth disparity, climate change, disease, and war." ―Jennifer Ruth Hosek, Professor, Queen's University, Canada

See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic