Quiet Suns: The End of the World Literature and Cold War Imaginaries for the Anthropocene

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics III: Fight Club of the Forgotten Future: Second and Third World Solidarity and Struggle on Screen

Abstract

This paper focuses on a contemporary experimental film about Cold War connections between the USSR and Ghana, treating it as a lens on philosophical discourses and dilemmas connected to climate change. The film, In the Year of the Quiet Sun (dir. Otolith Group, 2013), explores the legacy of the Soviet-Ghana relationship in the joint context of 1960s Pan-Africanism and a 1964-1965 international scientific mission to study the sun. Triangulating between the Pan-Africanism, post-WW2 decolonization projects, and solar exploration, the film reveals a mismatch between the internationalism generated by scientific collaboration and that produced by Second and Third World alliances. The former often overlooked the latter. In the Year of the Quiet Sun asks about the legacy of lost, abandoned and/or unrealized Second and Third World Cold War relationships for a twenty-first century context, a moment at which it is once again essential to imagine global alliance on an astro-planetary scale.

I read the film as a vehicle for resolving the dilemma of how to conceptualize history in the Anthropocene as it has been articulated both by postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty and French philosopher Catherine Malabou. The paper forms part of my second book project in genesis, entitled The End of the World Literature: Cold War Imaginaries for the Anthropocene. This book offers an alternative epistemology of World Literature that recognizes the essential role played by the Cold War contest between Communism and capitalism in shaping its definition of “world.” I turn to the period of the Cold War to explore circuits of literary and aesthetic exchange between the Eastern Bloc and countries involved in the Afro-Asian Solidarity movement. Non-Western imaginaries offer a framework for thinking the meaning of world in the era of climate change.

Author

• Cate I. Reilly, Duke U