On March 31, 2023, please join the Dramaturgies of Resistance for Cinema and Labour, an event focusing on the unique relationship film has with labour processes. We will begin with a 4pm screening of Margot Benacerraf’s 1959 poetic meditation on salt mining in Venezuela, Araya. Araya is, according to Benacerraf, “a great metaphor, a poem.” Filmed by a two-person crew, the film takes place in and around the Araya peninsula’s salt marsh. Depicting the metabolic relation between a community and their natural surroundings, Araya is a one-of-a-kind meditation on extraction and exertion.
Following the screening will be two talks: Pietro Bianchi’s paper, entitled “Araya, or the Problem of the Cinematographic Representation of the Double Nature of Labor,” will focus on the peculiar problems posed for representations of labour under the capitalist mode of production, given the seismic importance of Marx’s concept of abstract labour. Ling Zhang’s paper, entitled “Crystallizing Labor with Cinema: Salt Mining and Routine Rhythm in the Global South,” will center on quotidian and iterative elements of labour processes.
Michael Heinrich will join Dramaturgies of Resistance for a virtual talk on Thursday, January 19, 2023 from 3 to 5 p.m. The talk will occur on Zoom. See the abstract and author biography below.
Labor was a central concept for Marx, both for his analysis and for his respective critique of domination. However, over time not only the content of the concept of labor (alienated/non-alienated labor, division of labor/abolition of labor, abstract/concrete labor) but also the theoretical coordinate systems within which Marx used this concept changed considerably. I will discuss these changes and their consequences for Marx's analysis of capitalism and his critique of domination.
Michael Heinrich was for several years a collaborator of the new Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) and until 2016 professor of economics at the Hochschule fuer Technik und Wirtschaft (University of Applied Sciences) Berlin. Available in English is his Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital (2012), How to Read Marx's Capital (2021) and the first volume of his Marx biography Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society (2019).
This talk will consider Marx’s construction of the idea of capitalist slavery in Capital, as well as some of its implications for the black Jacobin tradition of revolutionary Caribbean thought.
Nick Nesbitt is Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures (French) with a Minor in Brazilian Portuguese from Harvard University. He has previously taught at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and at Miami University (Ohio), and in 2003–4 he was a Mellon Fellow at the Cornell University Society for the Humanities. He is the author of Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (Liverpool 2013); Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Virginia 2008); and Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Virginia 2003). He is also the editor of The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today (Duke 2017), Toussaint Louverture: The Haitian Revolution (Verso, 2008); co-editor of Revolutions for the Future: May '68 and the Prague Spring (Suture 2020); and co-editor (with Brian Hulse) of Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Music (Ashgate 2010). His most recent book is entitled The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (Virginia, 2022).
This event is supported by the Jackman Humanities Institute's Program for the Arts.
