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 Or, perhaps, scarcity might indicate a purposeful obfuscation of meaning that is consequently withdrawn from instrumentalization by political life, therefore incommensurate with nationalist or neo-imperial projects in the twentieth century. This panel invites participants to think expansively about alternate aesthetic circuits to surplus capital during the Cold War, theorizing scarcity as material condition, everyday practice, and formal aesthetic strategy. Such theoretical work involves frameworks for scarcity that might include, but are not limited to: postwar existentialism, Third Cinema as a fragmentary practice of harnessing scarce resources, cosmopolitanism in a time of emergency, subversive print cultures, the novel as a model of incommunicability, etc. In situating our conversation in the Cold War, an intermediate state of heightened uncertainty, unstable alignments, and waning utopian projects, this panel will contribute to the emerging study of the Cold War’s global paradigms.

Submit an abstract here by 9/30: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20693