Class and Capitalism in Literature, Film, and Culture I (Seminar / In-Person)

Submit Abstract

Special Session
Historical and Political Studies / Cultural Studies

Anna Atkeson (University of California - Irvine)
anna@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

Wednesday Hobson (Claremont Graduate University)
wedn@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

The way our current globally interconnected and digitally enabled capitalist formation continuously reshapes itself to reinforce categories of class and overarching capitalist structures requires analyses that engage and critique these adaptive forces of capital. Responding to this need, this seminar seeks to examine the relationship of texts to a global capitalist economy by asking how class and capitalism function within and exert force upon texts and their contexts—in film, literature, art, video games, social media, and other extratextual spaces such as fan sites. In concert with this year’s theme, we also invite examinations of the ways that traces of past modes of production remain within and interact with our evolving capitalist system and how these traces are expressed in cultural texts. Further, we welcome interrogations into how texts engage in, depict, or challenge hegemonic hauntings, such as in erasure through fetishization or the disjointed space and time of capitalism.
By addressing the relationship of texts to our current global capitalist economy, we seek to further our understanding of the nature of cultural production in our current economic formation, how that formation is reproduced, and potential methods of resistance. To that end, some questions we seek to engage with are: In what ways do texts enact or engage with the global capitalist system of our current moment? How might texts offer resistance to the capitalist system and imagine otherwise? Conversely, how might texts operate, either directly or indirectly, in the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production? In what ways do texts function as commodities and how is that process of commodification reflected within the structure, content, advertisement, and dissemination of those texts? How does labor or commodification intersect with race, gender, sexuality, ableness, etc.? And does this intersection present new vantage points from which to consider how class and the capitalist mode of production function?

We especially welcome submissions that focus on the following topics:

- How traces of earlier economic formations remain within and are integrated into or create contradictions within our present one and how these traces are expressed or depicted in cultural texts

- The re-instantiation of older modes of production, such as the current theorization around neo-feudalism

- The medium of media as a spectral (“neither living nor dead, present nor absent,” as Derrida claims) figuration of capital

- The spirit or specter of Marxism and/or analyses of political economy/Marxist critique within cultural texts

- Historical materialist readings of re-emergences of the past in contemporary culture, especially in terms of “ghostly matter” (as Avery Gordon terms it)

- The role that digital media plays in shaping contemporary space and time and its function as a technology of remembering and forgetting, with attention to how these roles function within the capitalist mode of production

- Commodification and the role of commodity fetishism in engaging with texts and sites of cultural production

- The hegemonic role of texts and their potential as a site of counter-hegemonic struggle

- The intersections of labor or commodification with class, race, gender, sexuality, ableness, etc. both within texts and in their production and distribution