NeMLA 2024: Cold War Scarcity
If this year's NeMLA Convention centers around the thematic of "surplus," this panel will consider its corollary in the problem of "scarcity." Situating our inquiry in the Global Cold War, which is shaped by the afterlives of decolonization, this panel asks: how might scarcity inflect our understanding of this period? Does it simply connote a lack or loss of unfulfilled revolutionary promises? Or does it point to a system of material debt that shapes cultural expression? Or, perhaps, scarcity might indicate a purposeful obfuscation of meaning that is consequently withdrawn from instrumentalization by political life, therefore incommensurate with nationalist or neo-imperial projects in the twentieth century.