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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel places screen media at the center of thinking about the conflicted history and legacies of Second and Third World allegiances during the Cold War. While it investigates how transnational film co-productions, distribution practices and artistic experiments, all rooted in collective visual imaginaries of emancipatory struggle, fostered links between the Second and Third Worlds, the panel simultaneously exposes points of rupture in these contiguities. To do so, the panel explores different aspects of cross-world moving-image cultures: cinematic infrastructures and creative collaborations forged for the sake of transcontinental collaboration; videocassette circulatory networks and popular viewing habits illustrative of the negotiation of shifting Cold War divides; and experimental film’s re-articulation of cinematic language as a tool for addressing critical global environmental issues. Each paper engages with a specific trajectory of the Second-Third-World exchanges: between Yugoslavia and Mozambique, the USSR and South/East Asia, and the USSR and Ghana. In this way, the panel offers a perspective on the multifaceted dynamics of media (dis)connections. How did filmmakers from different political and historical contexts negotiate the depiction of national liberation and solidarity? In what ways does a focus on the Second-Third-World alliances upset established scholarly narratives stressing the centrality of the Western film industry in determining trends in global film consumption? What do these exchanges reveal more generally about the late socialism’s affective investments? By addressing these issues, the panel elucidates the contours and fate of the post-WW2 project of constructing a global political community.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Cate I. Reilly, Duke U

Papers

• The Time of the Leopards and Tensions within Non-Aligned Solidarities - Sima Kokotovic, U of Pennsylvania

• Fighting Transworld: The 1980s Martial Arts Video Screens and Soviet Boevik Cultures - Iuliia Glushneva, McGill U (Canada)

• Quiet Suns: The End of the World Literature and Cold War Imaginaries for the Anthropocene - Cate I. Reilly, Duke U

Discussant

• Natasa Kovacevic, Eastern Michigan U