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.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction: A Cinema Against Precarity and Predatory Neoliberalism
1. Working-Class Solidarity as Project in Contemporary Franco-Belgian Factory Films
Helga Druxes (Williams College, USA)
2. Arts of Resistance in the Post-Socialist Workplace
Patricia Anne Simpson (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA)
3. Fevered Dreams of Neoliberalism in Films Made for the Russian Market
Alexandar Mihailovic (Bennington College, USA)
4. The Neoliberalization of Russia in the Films of Andrei Zvyagintsev
Alexandar Mihailovic (Bennington College, USA)
5. Becoming Other: Neoliberalism and “Suboptimal” Bodies Patricia Anne Simpson (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA)
6. Debased Black Masculinity as an Engine for Neoliberal Economies in African American Cinema
Helga Druxes (Williams College, USA)
7. Aging Out of the American Workplace: Intentional Communities and the Lure of the Open Road
Helga Druxes (Williams College, USA)
Epilogue
Helga Druxes (Williams College, USA), Patricia Anne Simpson (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA), Alexandar Mihailovic (Bennington College, USA)
BIbliography
Index
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 Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Russian at Hofstra University, USA and has taught at Williams and Bennington Colleges and in the Slavic Studies department at Brown University. His books include The Mitki and the Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia (2018), Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse (1997), and the edited volume Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries (Praeger, 1999).
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.
Review :
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.
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.
