Provincialising embedded liberalism: film, orientalism and the reconstruction of world order

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores conceptions of post-war world order promoted in appeals to ‘filmic internationalism’ – an Anglo-American movement of filmmakers, artists, and cultural bureaucrats who became committed to social-realist documentary films throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Examining this movement, I argue, allows us to reflect on the cultural consititution of embedded liberalsim, a vision of post-war order pursued not only in political-economic but also in cultural terms. Moreover, retelling the story of filmic internationalism also unsettles our accounts of embedded liberalism by foregrounding the lingering importance of imperial governmentality to interwar conversations regarding post-war world order. Traces of imperial governmentality are visible in both the ways in which filmmakers conveived the cultural agency of ‘other’ populations as well as the universal conceit with which they promoted a form of social governance. Recovering these ‘other’ stories, I argue, is a critical gesture which provincialises embedded liberalism by situating it in a more diverse set of contexts than is often acknowledged.