Cavernous, often cold, always dark, with the lingering smell of popcorn in the air: the experience of movie-going is universal. The cinematic experience in Mexico is no less profound, and has evolved in complex ways in recent years. Films like Y Tu Mama Tambien, El Mariachi, Amores Perros, and the work of icons like Guillermo del Toro and Salma Hayek represent much more than resurgent interest in the cinema of Mexico. In Screening Neoliberalism, Ignacio Sanchez Prado explores precisely what happened to Mexico's film industry in recent decades. Far from just a history of the period, Screening Neoliberalism explores four deep transformations in the Mexican film industry: the decline of nationalism, the new focus on middle-class audiences, the redefinition of political cinema, and the impact of globalization. This analysis considers the directors and films that have found international notoriety as well as those that have been instrumental in building a domestic market. Screening Neoliberalism exposes the consequences of a film industry forced to find new audiences in Mexico's middle-class in order to achieve economic and cultural viability.

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.' Always at stake in the examination of neoliberalism's consequences is a human being who is indexed by race, gender, nation, ability, and economic performance. 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.

Thanks to the rise of neoliberalism over the past several decades, we live in an era of rampant anxiety, insecurity, and inequality. While neoliberalism has become somewhat of an academic buzzword in recent years, this book offers a rich and multilayered introduction to what is arguably the most pressing issue of our times. Engaging with prominent scholarship in media and cultural studies, as well as geography, sociology, economic history, and political theory, author Julie Wilson pushes against easy understandings of neoliberalism as market fundamentalism, rampant consumerism, and/or hyper-individualism. Instead, Wilson invites readers to interrogate neoliberalism in true cultural studies fashion, at once as history, theory, practice, policy, culture, identity, politics, and lived experience. Indeed, the book’s primary aim is to introduce neoliberalism in all of its social complexity, so that readers can see how neoliberalism shapes their own lives, as well as our political horizons, and thereby start to imagine and build alternative worlds.

The financial collapse of 2008 extended and deepened a prolonged, multilayered crisis that has transformed, often in unexpected ways, how we think about all aspects of social life. Amid these turbulent times, film studies scholars have begun to ask new questions and create fresh strategies in order to integrate intellectual and political work in ways that directly address our current predicament. This timely volume reconsiders the relationships between cinema and society at a time when neoliberal policies threaten not only civic culture but also nearly every aspect of human life. Screening the Crisis brings together established authors as well as brilliant young scholars in the field of film studies to explore the ways in which new tendencies in US cinema enhance awareness of the complexity of the problems facing contemporary society. The issues addressed include economic inequality, shifts in gender roles, racial conflicts, immigration, surveillance practices, the environmental crisis, the politics of housing, and the fragility of nationhood. These questions are explored through in-depth studies and contextualized analyses of a wide variety of recent films, genres, and filmmakers. With its ample range of topics and perspectives, this collection provides an essential reference work for those who want to research how US cinema has responded to the manifold interconnected crises that characterize our current times.

Strategic Occidentalism examines the transformation, in both aesthetics and infrastructure, of Mexican fiction since the late 1970s. During this time a framework has emerged characterized by the corporatization of publishing, a frictional relationship between Mexican literature and global book markets, and the desire of Mexican writers to break from dominant models of national culture. In the course of this analysis, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado engages with theories of world literature, proposing that “world literature” is a construction produced at various levels, including the national, that must be studied from its material conditions of production in specific sites. In particular, he argues that Mexican writers have engaged in a “strategic Occidentalism” in which their idiosyncratic connections with world literature have responded to dynamics different from those identified by world-systems or diffusionist theorists. Strategic Occidentalism identifies three scenes in which a cosmopolitan aesthetics in Mexican world literature has been produced: Sergio Pitol’s translation of Eastern European and marginal British modernist literature; the emergence of the Crack group as a polemic against the legacies of magical realism; and the challenges of writers like Carmen Boullosa, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Ana García Bergua to the roles traditionally assigned to Latin American writers in world literature.

The authors interrogate the condition of the neoliberal project in the wake of the global crisis and neoliberalism's predicted death in 2007, both in terms of the regulatory structures of finance-led capitalism in Europe and North America, and the impact of new centres of capitalist power on global order.

Studying the case of Latin American cinema, this book analyzes one of the most public - and most exportable- forms of postcolonial national culture to argue that millennial era globalization demands entirely new frameworks for thinking about the relationship between politics, culture, and economic policies. Concerns that globalization would bring the downfall of national culture were common in the 1990s as economies across the globe began implementing neoliberal, free market policies and abolishing state protections for culture industries. Simultaneously, new technologies and the increased mobility of people and information caused others to see globalization as an era of heightened connectivity and progressive contact. Twenty-five years later, we are now able to examine the actual impact of globalization on local and regional cultures, especially those of postcolonial societies. Tracing the full life-cycle of films and studying blockbusters like City of God, Motorcycle Diaries, and Children of Men this book argues that neoliberal globalization has created a highly ambivalent space for cultural expression, one willing to market against itself as long as the stories sell. The result is an innovative and ground-breaking text suited to scholars interested in globalization studies, Latin-American studies and film studies.