[Commlist] Mundus Immundus: Unworlding, Afterlife, and the Cinema - new book

Open Humanities Press is delighted to announce the publication of


        /Mundus Immundus: Unworlding, Afterlife, and the Cinema
 <https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/mundus-immundus/>/

by Jens Andermann

How is our vanishing world experienced and cathected into affective 
circuits of fear and enjoyment, mourning and resistance? To consider 
what Hannah Arendt calls Entweltlichung, or loss of world, this book 
turns to cinema as an alternate form of thinking (in) the present. 
Mundus immundus — a central figure in Augustinian theology — offers a 
key for addressing the clashes and entanglements between the two 
histories that emplot our catastrophic present: the annihilation, in 
real time, of a habitable planet, and the becoming-fascist of 
late-capitalist subjectivities as our way of coexisting with and of 
enjoying the world’s unworlding.

But rather than to industrial cinema’s apocalyptic end-tales and their 
grand allegories of collapse and resurgence of extractive capitalism and 
white supremacy, Andermann turns to the neo-regionalist cinemas of the 
Global South to study unworlding and its afterlives as an interruption 
or withdrawal of cinematic worldmaking, forcing viewers to “stay with 
the trouble.” In dialogue with films by Pedro Costa, Lucrecia Martel, 
Kléber Mendonça Filho, Laura Citarella, Flora Gomes, Lisandro Alonso, 
and Adirley Queirós, among others, Mundus Immundus inquires about 
disaster by invoking some of its most illustrious names: Capitalocene 
(the relationship of mutual devastation that subsumes bodies and 
environments), Negrocene (the racialized denial of world that has 
sustained capitalism since its origins), and Thanatocene (the 
imbrication between technologies of war and extraction, and of these 
with forms of spectacle and enjoyment founded on destructiveness). But 
the book also explores the poetics and politics of afterlife — of 
survivance, re-existence, re-becoming Indigenous — and their 
manifestations in contemporary cinemas of re-enactment and re-performance.

Author Bio

Jens Andermann is David B. Kriser Professor in the Humanities at New 
York University. He is an editor of the Journal of Latin American 
Cultural Studies and of the book series SubAtlantic: Latin American, 
Caribbean, and Luso-African Ecologies (De Gruyter-Brill). He writes 
about art, literature, film, architecture and politics in Latin America 
and Luso-Africa. His books in English include Entranced Earth: Art, 
Extractivism, and the End of Landscape (Northwestern University Press, 
2023), New Argentine Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2011), and The Optic of the 
State. Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (Pittsburgh 2007), 
and as co-editor, Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics 
(De Gruyter, 2023); Natura. Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape 
(Diaphanes, 2018), and Latin American Cultural Studies: A Reader 
(Routledge, 2018).

Series

/Mundus immundus/is published as part of the CCC2 Irreversibility 
<https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/ccc2-irreversibility/>series, 
edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook.

:https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/ccc2-irreversibility

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