Cultural Resistance
LA Is Burning with Dennis Broe
Recording available on YouTubeDennis Broe examines the history of LA wildfires to shed light on the ingrained power, the structural class and racial imbalances, and the wanton devastation of a city organized not for its people but for its elites.
Bertolt Brecht’s Anti-Capitalist Aesthetics
Recording available on YouTubeAnthony Squiers presents an overview of Brecht’s revolutionary Marxist aesthetic and examine its usefulness as a weapon in today's struggles.
‘Roses for Gramsci’ with Andy Merrifield
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAuthor Andy Merrifield presents 'Roses for Gramsci,' a remarkable personal journey through the life and writings of the great Sardinian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci.
Darkest Los Angeles
Institute for the Radical Imagination NY, United StatesDennis Broe leads a group reading of his five Los Angeles novels set in the film-noir period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The contradictions we will unearth in that postwar period, the period of crime films that visually documented this seedy reality, have never been resolved, only continually papered over, and so they resound today.
Through the Lens of Spectacle: Panel 1, Oversight
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants“The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep,” Guy Debord declared in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): it is “a permanent opium war.” A half-century later, the specter of the spectacle continues to haunt Marxist cultural studies. In two linked panels, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture proposes to track “the worldwide division of spectacular tasks” from lens manufacture to retail logistics, stadiums to camptowns, polar expeditions to spring festivals, as well as revolutionary specters in novels and borders, assassinations and squares.
Through the Lens of Spectacle: Panel 2, Witness
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants“The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep,” Guy Debord declared in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): it is “a permanent opium war.” A half-century later, the specter of the spectacle continues to haunt Marxist cultural studies. In two linked panels, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture proposes to track “the worldwide division of spectacular tasks” from lens manufacture to retail logistics, stadiums to camptowns, polar expeditions to spring festivals, as well as revolutionary specters in novels and borders, assassinations and squares.