This panel explores popular culture meditations on the revolutionary potential of underclass subjects in a global context. In oftentimes contrapuntal dialogue with political theories of the lumpen, proletariat, and the multitudes, various historical materialist literary theorists and cinematographers, among myriad other cultural workers, have posed productive meditations on under class consciousness and revolutionary potential. These include attention to concientización, or consciousness raising, as a liminal and messy space that resists reductive frameworks. Panelists explore this process through contrapuntal readings of silences and displaced utterances in historical archival records from late-20^th Century Cuba, neorealist Italian Cinema, and Indian Theater from the Naxalbari Revolutionary Movement.

In “Towards a Coolie Class Consciousness: Boundedness and Repetition in the 1876 Cuba Commission Report,” Rebecca Liu examines the 1874 Qing imperial government of China’s official delegation to Spanish Cuba to investigate the alleged work-based abuses that Chinese indentured workers, commonly called “coolies,” faced on Cuba’s sugar plantations. The resulting 1876 Cuba Commission Report details the brutalities—floggings, imprisonment, starvation, and even murder—that such workers endured in the plantation system. This paper reads the Cuba Commission Report for its use of repetition—a formal strategy that the Report employs to corral the nearly 3,000 testimonies into a single, linear narrative of the coolie’s plight, from the first decoying or kidnapping on the southern shores of China, to the ship voyage (what some scholars have called “another middle passage”), to coolies’ working conditions in Cuba, and concluding with the commissioners’ attestations that coolies have “spoken freely” in giving such testimonies. Through an analysis of the use of repetition in the Report’s organization of these testimonies, the paper explores the emergence of the temporality of bondage: Those testifying to the causes of death of other coolies recognize that such deaths—from exhaustion, suicide, or murder—are bound to happen to them. At the same time, coolies are bound to these forms of death due to the forced recontractions and interminable bondage of their contracts. Reading against the grain of this trans-imperial archive, the paper examines how these workers articulate a proto-revolutionary class consciousness, recognizing that their futures are bound together.

In "Class Consciousness and “Chorality” in De Sica and Zavattini’s Bicycle Thieves,” Adrian Guo-Silver examines Vittorio De Sica and writer Cesare Zavattini’s Italian Neorealist classic, Bicycle Thieves. Although clearly sympathetic to the sufferings of the poor, the film presents a social landscape that resists any definitive or singular categorization. Nor does it suggest how, or if, such suffering progresses towards class consciousness. The film’s depiction of disorganization among the poor, and the failure to achieve even a semblance of social justice, have frustrated Marxist analyses since Guido Aristarco’s initial commentary on the film’s release in 1948. This paper interrogates those ambivalent, politically frustrating aspects of the film’s depiction of Rome’s underclass through Etienne Balibar’s construction of the “transindividual.” Drawing on his close readings of Freud’s “Group Psychology and Ich Analysis” and Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” the paper reinvigorates, a term that has haunted the discourse of Neorealism: “chorality.” This reading of the concept offers an alternative to prior understandings of the chorus either as a prefigured, ontologically stable group or as an idealist, “imaginary crowd” detached from objective reality. Instead, “chorality” blurs the distinctions between individual and group, actor and spectator, subject and object, helping us reevaluate the relationship between subjectivity and class formation.

In “Class Tussle in the Naxalbari Movement (1965-1975): History and Class Conflict in Inquilaab: A Play in Three Acts,” Pritha Sarkar explores explores the difference between the middle class and the peasantry within the Naxalbari movement and the consequent tussle through Inquilaab: A Play in Three Acts (1971), by Asif Currimbhoy. The Naxalbari movement (1965-1975) was the first peasant movement within twenty years of Indian independence that erupted in a small village named Naxalbari in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, India. This paper shows explores an ideological tussle within the movement between the peasantry and the middle class once the peasantry is in the same leading position as the middle class had been. Accordingly, the paper examines the different demands made by both classes, and secondly, the rupturing of middle-class leadership by the peasantry. Thus, the paper ultimately explores the subversive voices against the class hierarchy within the movement against the backdrop of the movement’s claim of creating an egalitarian society.

Following the 18 minute presentations by each panelist, respondent Ben Olguín will offer responses to each paper, which will open audience discussion.