We invite you to join the Critical Speakers Series in welcoming Professor Matthew Croombs for his lecture “Cinematic Solidarity and the Global Imaginary.” The talk will take place on Monday, November 11th from 3–4:30 p.m. in Donovan Lounge and will be followed by a dinner with graduate students. There will also be a graduate seminar on Tuesday, November 12th from 10–11:30 a.m. 

The explosion of global protest movements over the past twenty years have made visible their shared sense of contemporaneity through slogans that have linked Ferguson to Gaza, Sao Paolo to Gezi Park, and perhaps best embodied in reference to the Arab Spring uprisings, as “Everywhere is Tahrir.” This sense of interconnectedness has been articulated through the term “solidarity,” a once-relic of an earlier phase of class struggle, which now clamors across public spheres globally, resonating with the expressions of resistance of the 21st century. Prof. Croombs’ talk seizes on this renewed investment in the term solidarity, questioning how we might begin to theorize an aesthetics of solidarity for the cinema, focusing on the cinematic legacies of Third-World internationalism. Through his lecture, he seeks to respond to a growing impetus within Film and Media studies to reopen the influential and overlooked film radicalisms of the past in order to better conceptualize the role of cinema within the ideological battle-lines of advanced capitalism.

Prof. Croombs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. His work focuses on the intersection between documentary film, political modernism, and anti-colonialism and has been published in Discourse, Cinema Journal, Third Text, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Screen.