*Rethinking neoliberalism on screen  *
October 5-6 2023

Paris, TBA

Organizers: Julie Amiot-Guillouet, Yann Giraud and Catherine Marshall (CY
Cergy Paris Université)

Scientific committee: Asal Bagheri (CY Cergy Paris Université), Alan Kahan
(Université Versaille-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), Ramon Lobato (RMIT
University, Melbourne), Christopher Mier (uc3m, Madrid), Luke O’Sullivan
(National University of Singapore), Gilles Pinson (Sciences Po Bordeaux),
Ignacio Sanchez Prado (Washington University, Saint Louis), Deborah Shaw
(University of Portsmouth), Ana Vinuela (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle,
Paris)

 Over the past two decades, studies on neoliberalism have made such a
breakthrough in the social sciences and the humanities that there is no
longer any area in which the notion has not been employed/re-employed or
misemployed. Once understood as a simple economic doctrine, namely the
pro-market counter-revolution that took place during the late 1970s and the
first half of the 1980s, the term now describes a broader development that
can be summarized, at the risk of being schematic, as the application of a
certain type of economic rationalism to all aspects of society. If the term
"neoliberalism" has thus been able to leave the domain of economic and
political studies and impose itself in cultural studies, it is because it
has alternatively been used to describe an ideology, a given stage of
capitalism, a type of governmentality and the larger zeitgeist in which
Western societies have been evolving for the past forty years or so,
encompassing under the same umbrella very different ideas, theories and
practices as well as the cultural imaginary that is attached to it.

 It is therefore not surprising that the notion of neoliberalism has been
used in the field of film studies, both to speak of works of cinema and
their underlying ideology and of the economic conditions in which they were
produced. At least two collections of essays in the last decade have been
devoted to studying these aspects (Kapur and Wagner 2011, Mazierska and
Kristensen 2017) and there are also books devoted to studying the impact of
neoliberalism on specific subgenres of cinema or TV series. These works,
although pioneering, seem to us to present conceptual limits and end up
being a source of confusion. On the one hand, some of these works start
from a very precise definition of neoliberalism, or at least one that is
ideologically or methodologically anchored – for example, Marxist or
Foucauldian – and attempt to apply to filmic objects those quite rigid
lines of interpretation – necessarily leading to reinforcing them. On the
other hand, other contributions avoid defining the concept clearly,
juxtaposing quite different things under the same moniker, for example: the
display of economic constraints weighing on characters’ decisions, the
depiction of greedy corporate or financial communities, that of precarious
populations whose lives are affected by neoliberalism and, at its most
abstract, fictions attempting to show that competition, rather than mutual
aid, increasingly permeates contemporary societies.

 In order to try to circumvent some of these pitfalls, the aim of this
international conference is to propose  not to bring together yet another
set of contributions that attempt to analyze filmic objects under the prism
of a pre-established definition of neoliberalism or to interpret them in
order to deliver a "neoliberal reading" of them, but, on the contrary, to
offer, through an analysis of films and their contexts of production,
elements which would make it possible to rethink and refine the notion of
neoliberalism itself. We welcome contributions by experts in cultural/film
studies, historians, sociologists, economists, and critical theorists, etc.
interested in tackling those issues.

 These are the main questions at the heart of this project (the subject
list of course non-exhaustive):

   - Among the many definitions of neoliberalism that critical
   theorists/economists have given in recent years, which ones are most likely
   to be conveyed on screen?
   - Do all film representations of economic behavior or facts constitute a
   discourse on neoliberalism? Can we consider forms of filmed representations
   of the economy that are not neoliberal?
   - To what extent have recent developments in the film industry - and
   entertainment more generally - affected the economic content of films and
   television series? Has the rise of streaming services such as Netflix,
   Disney + or Amazon Prime had an impact on the economic discourse conveyed
   by films or television series?
   - Does neoliberalism only have negative effects on the diversity of
   cinematographic and television works and their ability to contest? To what
   extent do neoliberal production and distribution structures allow works
   that criticize the system to be put on the market? Is there a connection
   between neoliberalism and the promotion of identities that were once
   underrepresented on screen?
   - Is there a link between neoliberalism and the emergence of new visual
   arts such as video games or videos broadcast on tubes and social networks?
   - Can studying remakes of relatively old – i.e., pre-neoliberal - films
   released after the rise of neoliberalism teach us anything about how
   neoliberalism affected the cinematic imagination?
   - Is the appearance of rating sites for films, series, or video games,
   which challenge the traditional standards of knowledge production, an
   emanation of neoliberal veridiction?

Scholars interested in participating are invited to send an abstract of
their intended contributions of no more than 500 words by *February 28*,
2023, to *[log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>*.


Notifications of decision will be sent by March 31. Full papers (first
draft) will be due by September 15, so that all participants can read them
in advance and react to them. Also, please note that while the conference
will be mostly held in-person, remote participation may be considered on a
case-by-case basis.

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