From Socialist Screens to Global-Popular: Unearthing Alternative Genealogies

In recent years, there has been a growing acknowledgment among cultural critics and media scholars of the unexpected power wielded by popular culture originating from the Global South. This media output, increasingly consumed worldwide, has emerged as a formidable force, often challenging the dominance of Hollywood and other entertainment giants of the Global North. Scholars attribute the origins of these new global media flows to the advancements in technology and the onset of globalization of entertainment industries in the late 1980s and 1990s, Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar have theorized this cultural phenomenon as indicative of a distinct "global-popular" modality: its influence is undeniable, yet its political implications remain ambiguous.

However, can we construct longer genealogies to challenge our understanding of global media circuits, their origins, continuities, ruptures, and the politics and ideologies embedded within the global-popular today?
Stemming from Salazkina's recently published book Romancing Yesenia: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture (University of California Press, 2024), the talk will address this question by drawing out the history of commercial melodramatic media from India, Egypt, and Latin America on socialist film screens during the 1950s-1990s.

Masha Salazkina's work incorporates transnational approaches to film theory and cultural history with a focus on the historical relationship between the Socialist bloc and countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Her first book In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico (University of Chicago Press, 2009) positions Eisenstein's unfinished Mexican project and theoretical writings within the wider context of post-revolutionary Mexico and global cultures of modernity. Her new book, World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities and Solidarities in the Global Cold War is coming out with California University Press in 2023. Through its analysis of the history and the programming of the Tashkent Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the book argues for socialist cinema in the 1960s-1980s as a global phenomenon whose cultural and geopolitical networks extended across the three continents. Dr Salazkina has published essays in Cinema Journal, Film History, October, Screen, Framework, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, and many edited collections on such topics as the geopolitics of film and media theory production; theorizations of World Cinema; history of film education; cinemas of solidarity and internationalism. She also co-edited Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (2015) and Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures (2022, both from Indiana University Press).

Her current research projects center on the reception of Latin American popular media in the Soviet bloc in the 1970s-1980s, and the shared history of the circulation of popular music across the Global South and the Socialist bloc.

Sponsors

    Cinema Studies Institute
    Department of Slavic & East European Languages & Cultures