David Platt

Ph.D. student
platzky102@gmail.com
@Platticus_Finch

David Platt’s dissertation examines African science-fiction films as a means to reading the operations of, and imagining the end of, globalized neoliberal capitalism. His work contends that if one wishes to examine present-day capitalism, and science-fiction’s potential to imagine a future beyond it, then it is in Africa that one finds the paradigmatic expression of those processes and possibilities. An expansion of his M.A. thesis, his research takes up a perspective influenced equally by postcolonial and Marxist theory, in addition to genre studies, balanced between a more postmodern cultural approach and structuralist analysis. His dissertation sets out to make the case that only through a marriage of these frameworks might both the ideological and material projects that undergird capitalism’s myriad functions be apprehended and challenged. In order to apprehend both the specificity of capitalism’s manifestation in different national or regional contexts, as well as the way those contexts are imbricated into the same globalized structures, his work looks at films from such diverse locations as Kenya, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Benin, South Africa and Nigeria.

Research Interests

Science fiction cinemas, transnationalism, African cinemas, cinema and capitalism, postcolonial theory, Marxist theory, genre studies

Education

B.A., Film Studies/Film Production, University of Cape Town, 2013
M.A., Film Studies, King’s College London, 2016