Nature, For and Against I: Marx, Nature, Cinema

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Until the 21c, Marx and Engels were universally seen as celebrating the human technological and industrial mastery of nature as progressive laws of history. Two British scholars, Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster, radically changed that portrait by showing the concerns Marx and Engels shared for the destructive unintended consequences of capitalist industrialization and, more importantly, by identifying in Marx and Engels a serious engagement with 19c ecological thought and a profound, if unsystematic, ecological critique of capitalism and awareness of the mulitple forms of nature’s resistance to human efforts at mastery. This panel addresses some of the ways that such a marxist ecology can be found in Soviet cinema and culture.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Auriane Benabou, New York U

Papers

• Nonindifferent Nature: Reading Nadezhda Zubova’s 'Arabi' (Uzbek SSR, 1930) against the Grain - Lilya Kaganovsky, UCLA

• Comparative Socialist Cinemas of Extraction - Anne Eakin Moss, U of Chicago

• Marxist Ecocriticism and Eisenstein’s Non Indifferent Nature - Joan Neuberger, U of Texas at Austin

Discussant

• Elizabeth A. Papazian, U of Maryland, College Park