Solidarity and World Cinema Otherwise
The word solidarity is much alive these days in the vocabulary and political actions of social movements. Solidarity is at work when people take to the streets to join Black Lives Matter in protesting police brutality; in women’s decision to cut their hair in the middle of Iran’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” feminist movement; and in today’s widespread support of Palestinian lives struggling against Israel’s genocidal project in Gaza. If these global phenomena have enjoyed any success in mobilizing action, it’s because solidarity has the capacity to promote shared practices of resistance and political alliances despite national, cultural, racial, and linguistic barriers. There, no less, is where its potency resides.
Due to this potency, solidarity has been amply discussed in sociology, geography, feminism, and human rights studies. Cinema studies, however, have been late to the academic interest in solidarity. My book, Transnational Cinema Solidarity: Chilean Exile Film and Video after 1973, joins a growing body of work that questions what solidarity might mean and do for film and media studies. What would film history look like if we set a geography of solidarities into motion, if we studied its transits across continents and decades? Transnational Cinema Solidarity examines this question through the history of Chilean exile film and video, from their global emergence out of networks of solidarity in the 1970s to their ongoing return to Chilean archives in the last two........
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