Screening Solidarity: Neoliberalism and Transnational Cinemas

Helga Druxes · Alexandar Mihailovic · Patricia Anne Simpson

Apr 2023 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

About this eBook

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 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.