"Zombies", Attention and the Sublime in the Digital Anthropocene

Autori

  • Mohammad Shabangu Colby College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2025.16.1.5594

Parole chiave:

attention, attention economy, attention ecology, digital Anthropocene, the sublime

Abstract

This essay offers a meta-critique of the aesthetic and political categories of “the Anthropocene sublimes.” It is interested in the short-film Zombies (2019) by filmmaker Baloji, and takes it as an aesthetic catalyst to address some timely questions about the Anthropocene vis-à-vis the digital ecosystem that surround us: What are the prospects of the sublime in an era of generalized attention deficiency? How is the imaginative potential of the sublime foreclosed by our collective suffering of attention deficiency in a Capitalocene? Relatedly, what is the link between, on the one hand, the common interruption of a sustained attention and, on the other hand, the thwarted efficacy of the sublime as an apparatus of critical and eco-consciousness? I look to the film Zombies to consider the possibility of responding to its inferred injunction to reclaim attention as one practice in countering the snares of a networked global economy driven by an abiding digital imperative.

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Biografia autore

Mohammad Shabangu, Colby College

Mohammad Shabangu is an Assistant Professor of English at Colby College. His forthcoming monograph is titled African Aesthetic Imagination and the Double Bind of Globality. His teaching and research interests include contemporary African literatures, world literatures, postcolonial literatures and cultures of the 20th/21st century, as well as critical literary theory.

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Pubblicato

2025-04-30

Fascicolo

V. 16 N. 1 (2025): Anthropocene Sublimes

Sezione

Articles: Anthropocene Sublimes

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