Screening Solidarity: Neoliberalism and Transnational Cinemas

(Paperback)

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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 neoliberalisms 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.

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 *

Author Bio

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 Bakhtins 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). Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. She publishes widely on German cultural studies from the early modern era to the present. She is currently completing a book-length study of coloniality and decolonial discourses and practices in German-speaking Europe.