Papers by Sarah Ann Wells
Comparative literature studies, May 1, 2024
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Dec 8, 2022
Routledge eBooks, Oct 15, 2018
Routledge Companion to Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms, 2022
Apprehending work is a thorny endeavor. It can seem like obscenity, in the memorable phrase of a ... more Apprehending work is a thorny endeavor. It can seem like obscenity, in the memorable phrase of a certain US Supreme Court justice: I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. Conceptually and ideologically, work is protean; scholars, artists, and institutions have adopted different strategies to stipulate its scope and value. One strategy has been to create subcategories that parcel out work's complicated dimensions. This solution-a "division of labor" of work itself-appears both in the taxonomies of the International Labor Organization (ILO) as well as in philosophy, notably in Hannah Arendt's polemical distinction between work and labor in The Human Condition (1958). 1 Others invoke a near-baroque paradox to capture work's ambivalence: an imprisoning freedom. This paradox is partially resolved by Marxist approaches through the concept of the alienation of under capitalism, yet neither Marx nor Marxian approaches to the status and meaning of work are fixed. 2 A final approach is to posit something more elusive-often called "work itself " or "work as such"-and claim that it has been hidden from view. Thus T.J. Clark, writing of the fine arts: "There are pictures in plenty of worship, anguish, celebration, states of mind; but, for many reasons, there are few images of work. It is too obvious and too obdurate for form: painters avoid it." 3 On one hand, Clark notes that work's stubborn, enduring literalness makes it an unattractive subject matter for artists; on the other, his quote reveals the ways in which work seems equally elusive for scholars, critics, and viewers. For whether we agree with his assertion of the paucity of images of work in the visual arts depends on how we identify the working body-who works, how they work, and how artworks approach this labor. A recent New York Times article, for example, suggests that viewers gaze upon "calming images" during the pandemic, giving as an example Honoré Daumier's "The Laundress" (1863). 4 Yet this painting depicts a figure engaged in taxing labor that only looks calming to people who fail to recognize it as such. This essay considers South American art's relationship to work during the long twentieth century through case studies from two critical moments in its history. In the first, the social art movement of the 1930s and 1940s, artists sought affinities with manual laborers; in the second, the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, artists questioned these same affinities. While the 1930s witnessed a fraught approximation between artist and laborer on the canvases and walls of public buildings, the 1960s and 1970s threw this alliance into doubt in the circumscribed space of the gallery and its para-spaces, including architecture, periodicals,
Choice Reviews Online, 2016
Comparative Literature, 2021
At the Shores of Work 1 While it would be hard to ascertain a single origin for the multiple film... more At the Shores of Work 1 While it would be hard to ascertain a single origin for the multiple films the Lumières made in 1895, "Workers Leaving the Factory" is often read by both filmmakers and theorists as an origin for cinema. 2 Farocki's video essay Workers Leaving the Factory (1995) preceded the written text. For an analysis of Farocki and the problem of cinema and labor, see especially Gorfinkle. 3 The struggle over "the Working Day" (Marx 340-416) is central to labor resistance; the process by which, per the factory inspectors, "moments [become] the elements of profit," a "petty pilfering of minutes" (352). See also Thompson.
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2020
A Contracorriente, 2019
An uptick in films about sex work and other forms of immaterial labor in contemporary Latin Ameri... more An uptick in films about sex work and other forms of immaterial labor in contemporary Latin America points to a crisis in our understanding of bodies at work. This crisis finds a precedent in cinema of the 1970s, a moment in which sex work finds a particular protagonism on screen. During this period, artists and activists together posited a replacement of the prostitute as a metaphor of dehistoricized alienation with the metonymy of sex work as labor. Grounded in a formal and material analysis of the Brazilian films and film networks grouped under the rubric Boca do Lixo (São Paulo, 1973-1982), I show how they queried, through sex work, what we imagine when we invoke the term work. Attentive to the sexual division of labor that structures these films, I also show how this relatively neglected and maligned moment in Brazilian film history offers a salient case study of how sex work in the cinema negotiates labor’s shifting fortunes, in and beyond Brazil, and into the present. As a limit case of what constitutes work in modernity, sex work in the cinema is uniquely poised to reveal its seismographic shifts.
In recent years, the death of cinema has become an anxious critical and popular commonplace. This... more In recent years, the death of cinema has become an anxious critical and popular commonplace. This article examines this problem through a series of contemporary South American film s and film projects by critically-acclaimed directors Esteban Sapir and Federico León (Argentina), Federico Veiroj (Uruguay), and Eduardo Coutinho (Brazil), all o f which contend with cinema' s status as a late or eclipsed medium. While aesthetically divergent, their film s share a desire to stage cinema' s lateness through two key tropes: architecture and modes o f transport. Through mise-en-scene, framing, and montage, as well as through attentive ness to cinema' s shifting processes o f circulation and reception, they construct a hauntology o f the medium' s promises, in particular the mid-century modernist utopia o fa democratic cinephilia as a privileged mode o f spatial-temporal travel. Ultimately, I suggest the ways in which contemporary South American film offers us a unique position from which to explore the global debates on cinema' s ostensible demise as both medium and institution.
O presente artigo analisa o romance Parque industrial (1933), de Patrícia Galvão (Pagu), como uma... more O presente artigo analisa o romance Parque industrial (1933), de Patrícia Galvão (Pagu), como uma tentativa de repensar a forma do romance em relação com a esfera crescente da cultura de massas nos anos 30 no Brasil. Minha proposta é ler o romance como um texto do modernismo tardio preocupado, pela primeira vez, tanto com o registro quanto com a produção da figura emergente e instável das massas. Eu focalizo em duas mídias: o cinema, especificamente na montagem soviética, e a voz humana, mostrando como Pagu negocia com elas. A partir das teorias contemporâneas de Walter Benjamin e a reflexão mais recente de Roberto Schwarz, situo o romance de Pagu como parte de uma batalha mais ampla em torno de como escrever com e através da lógica da reprodução seriada.
Science fiction (SF) cinema is uniquely poised to explore the ways in which our experiences of tr... more Science fiction (SF) cinema is uniquely poised to explore the ways in which our experiences of transnational, industrial labor have shifted over the long twentieth century. This article examines the emergent genre of US-Mexico border science fiction as a response to the globalized forms of labor that emerged in the post-NAFTA period, analyzing the genre's mise-en-scène as staging the mutually constitutive dimensions of First and Third World labor. I ground my analysis of the genre through a reading of Sleep Dealer (2008), the first feature film by the documentary filmmaker Alex Rivera, and by drawing upon other border SF texts. Two tropes, I argue, run through the genre: that of the scar, staging a modernist haunting of a history of exploitation, and that of the node, embodying the increasingly dispersed grid of global capitalism. The interplay between them sets the terms for border science fiction as its own genre. Ultimately, I show, border science fiction adopts a strategic peripheral position that underscores how difference is produced within the broader SF genre, in a rereading of some of its most influential theorists. At the same time, it imagines alternative futures to the unequal flows of global capitalism.
RESUMO: O ensaio propõe uma leitura do romance de Graciliano Ramos, Angústia (1936), como reflexã... more RESUMO: O ensaio propõe uma leitura do romance de Graciliano Ramos, Angústia (1936), como reflexão ambígua sobre a possibilidade de registrar o seu presente. Ele analisa o esforço de pensar a transição histórica, num momento que se proclama revolucionário, mas onde tudo parece ficar igual. Enfocando nas formas particulares da escritura pós-modernista da época, mostra como Graciliano constrói uma escritura que parece abranger a derrota das formas eufóricas modernistas, mas, ao mesmo tempo, resistir ao imperativo da época de fixar a realidade. Incorporando textos contemporâneos do arquivo da época, o ensaio articula um entre-lugar onde o romance de Graciliano procura intervir no presente através das ruínas do passado recente. ABSTRACT: This essay proposes a reading of Graciliano Ramos' novel Angústia (Anguish, 1936) as an ambiguous reflection on the possibility of registering the present. It analyzes the effort to think historical transition, at a moment which proclaims itself to be revolutionary but in which everything appears to be the same. Focusing on the particular forms of post-modernist writing of the era, the essay shows how Graciliano constructs a writing that appears to encompass the failure of the euphoric forms of the earlier modernists but which, at the same time, resists the era's imperative to reflect reality. Through readings of contemporaneous texts from the archive, the essay articulates an " in-between " in which Graciliano's novel seeks to intervene in the present through the ruins of the recent past.
Access Provided by The University of Iowa Libraries at 09/07/11 2:03PM GMT M O D E R N I S M / m ... more Access Provided by The University of Iowa Libraries at 09/07/11 2:03PM GMT M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 426 erudite essays and speculative ficciones, it also represents a unique moment in his own relationship to writing, the market, and the materials of a burgeoning culture industry. 4
Book Reviews by Sarah Ann Wells
Books by Sarah Ann Wells
(Collected volume, edited by Steven S. Lee and Amelia M. Glaser)
Founded by Vladimir Lenin in ... more (Collected volume, edited by Steven S. Lee and Amelia M. Glaser)
Founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1919 to instigate a world revolution, the Comintern advanced not just the proletarian struggle but also a wide variety of radical causes, including those against imperialism and racism in settings as varied as Ireland, India, the United States, and China. Notoriously, and from the organization’s outset, these causes grew ever more subservient to Soviet state interest and Stalinist centralization. Comintern Aesthetics shows how the cultural and political networks emerging from the Comintern have continued, even after its demise in 1943. Tracking these networks through a multiplicity of artistic forms geared towards advancing a common, liberated humanity, this volume captures the failure of a Soviet-centered world revolution, but also its enduring allure in the present.
The sixteen chapters in this edited volume examine cultural and revolutionary circuits that once connected Moscow to China, Southeast Asia, India, the Near East, Eastern Europe, Germany, Spain, and the Americas. The Soviet Union of the interwar years provided a template for the convergence of party politics and cultural history, but the volume traces how this template was adapted and reworked around the world. By emphasizing the shared, Soviet routes of these far-flung circuits, Comintern Aesthetics recaptures a long-lost moment in which cultures could not only transform perception, but also highlight alternatives to capitalism, namely, an anti-colonial world imaginary foregrounding race, class, and gender equality.
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Papers by Sarah Ann Wells
Book Reviews by Sarah Ann Wells
Books by Sarah Ann Wells
Founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1919 to instigate a world revolution, the Comintern advanced not just the proletarian struggle but also a wide variety of radical causes, including those against imperialism and racism in settings as varied as Ireland, India, the United States, and China. Notoriously, and from the organization’s outset, these causes grew ever more subservient to Soviet state interest and Stalinist centralization. Comintern Aesthetics shows how the cultural and political networks emerging from the Comintern have continued, even after its demise in 1943. Tracking these networks through a multiplicity of artistic forms geared towards advancing a common, liberated humanity, this volume captures the failure of a Soviet-centered world revolution, but also its enduring allure in the present.
The sixteen chapters in this edited volume examine cultural and revolutionary circuits that once connected Moscow to China, Southeast Asia, India, the Near East, Eastern Europe, Germany, Spain, and the Americas. The Soviet Union of the interwar years provided a template for the convergence of party politics and cultural history, but the volume traces how this template was adapted and reworked around the world. By emphasizing the shared, Soviet routes of these far-flung circuits, Comintern Aesthetics recaptures a long-lost moment in which cultures could not only transform perception, but also highlight alternatives to capitalism, namely, an anti-colonial world imaginary foregrounding race, class, and gender equality.
Founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1919 to instigate a world revolution, the Comintern advanced not just the proletarian struggle but also a wide variety of radical causes, including those against imperialism and racism in settings as varied as Ireland, India, the United States, and China. Notoriously, and from the organization’s outset, these causes grew ever more subservient to Soviet state interest and Stalinist centralization. Comintern Aesthetics shows how the cultural and political networks emerging from the Comintern have continued, even after its demise in 1943. Tracking these networks through a multiplicity of artistic forms geared towards advancing a common, liberated humanity, this volume captures the failure of a Soviet-centered world revolution, but also its enduring allure in the present.
The sixteen chapters in this edited volume examine cultural and revolutionary circuits that once connected Moscow to China, Southeast Asia, India, the Near East, Eastern Europe, Germany, Spain, and the Americas. The Soviet Union of the interwar years provided a template for the convergence of party politics and cultural history, but the volume traces how this template was adapted and reworked around the world. By emphasizing the shared, Soviet routes of these far-flung circuits, Comintern Aesthetics recaptures a long-lost moment in which cultures could not only transform perception, but also highlight alternatives to capitalism, namely, an anti-colonial world imaginary foregrounding race, class, and gender equality.