An Evening With Helga Druxes and Alexander Mihailovic

Western neoliberalism is a predatory outgrowth of late capitalism that overvalues competition, transferring the laws of the market to human relationships. This book advances the argument that anti-neoliberal cinemas of Europe, the United States, and the Russian Federation imagine and visualize alternatives to the non-sovereign realities of a neoliberal workplace that unequivocally endorses dangerous risk-taking, self-optimizing neoliberal subjects, and corporate ‘entrepreneurs of self.’
Drawing on film theory, transnational social histories, critical race theory, and Marxist and Foucauldian interpretive models, this book rediscovers a cinema that imagines a social contract focused on the common good and ethical standards for the social state. Anti-neoliberal cinema empowers the viewer as agentive through narratives that detail resistance to Western neoliberal modes of living and working. These filmmakers dramatize the labor of making solidarity across different groups.

Helga Druxes taught German language and literature and Comparative Literature at Williams College between 1987 and 2022. She is Paul H. Hunn’55 Professor in Social Studies, emerita Her research interests focus on contemporary political and social issues: the language of the German far right, anti-neoliberal cinema, diversity and Islamophobia in twenty-first century Germany. She is the lead author of Screening Solidarity: International Cinemas Confront Western Neoliberalisms, Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2023 and the books Resisting Bodies: The Negotiation of Female Agency in Twentieth-Century Women Writers, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996; Kritik series, and

The Feminization of Dr. Faustus: Female Identity Quests from Stendhal to Morgner, University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993.

She co-edited Digital Media Strategies of the Far Right Across Europe and the United States, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015 and is the lead editor of the first English language volume on Navid Kermani (Peter Lang Oxford, June 2016).

She is also co-editor of a special issue on Pegida, German Politics and Society, (Georgetown University and Berghahn Books), vol. 34, no. 4 (Winter 2016) and authored articles on twentieth and twenty-first century cinema, and contemporary fiction by women.

Alexandar Mihailovic is the author of Illiberal Vanguard: Populist Elitism in the United States and Russia. His other books include the edited volume Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries and The Mitki and the Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia, which was published in a Russian translation that was shortlisted for the Kandinsky Prize in 2021, in the category of writing about contemporary Russian art.