Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media IV: Transcultural Flows and their Socialist Valences: Different Scales of Second and Third World Exchange

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel investigates different registers of cultural exchanges between the Second and Third Worlds. From memoirs of Lithuanian writers about working on Brazilian plantations, through Yugoslav media experts' involvement in the Broadcasting Organization of Non-Aligned Countries, to exchanges between Soviet and Cuban filmmakers, it centers on different conceptions and practices of socialism that the transcultural flows instantiated. These examples demonstrate complex geographies at the heart of the histories of global socialism. Mostly unaccounted for, such geographies signal a necessity for a more expansive understanding of socialist ideas that moved people across the world.
Indeed, pivotal new research has brought needed attention to global cultural configurations, that spanned continents and brought into dialogue an unexpected constellation of cultural actors (Popescu 2020; Djagalov 2020; Salazkina 2023). The new debates foreground the question of the distinction between top-down and bottom-up initiatives as one of the essential tensions of transcontinental exchanges. Though commonly supported by the states, the exchanges were repeatedly proposed and organized by locally situated political and cultural actors. Moreover, as the papers in this panel demonstrate, they also unfold outside of the purviews of the state. In other words, the instances of transnational connections moved across different terrains and institutional contexts. Attentiveness to the different scales is crucial for grasping logistical, infrastructural, and material conditions shaping progressive global political horizons of the 20th century. As a way to contribute to the ongoing debates, the four papers offer distinct and materially grounded approaches to analyzing unmapped dimensions and geographies of socialist cultural flows.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Asher Anthony Maria, U of Pennsylvania

Papers

• From the Estate to the Fazenda: Working an Other Lithuanian Identity in Stasys Jonas Jokubka’s 'On the Brazilian Plantations' - Asher Anthony Maria, U of Pennsylvania

• Non-Aligned Media and its Infrastructure of Decolonization - Sima Kokotovic, U of Pennsylvania

• Returning the Gaze: Mapping the Soviet Socialist Project in Julio García Espinosa’s 'The Sixth Part of the World' - Dasha Prokhorova, U of Pittsburgh

• Magical Realism and Marxist Aesthetics: García Márquez in the Second World - Michael Lavery, U of Maryland, College Park

Discussant

• Maria Corrigan, Emerson College