Joshua Wiebe defended his doctoral dissertation, "Form/Labour/Negation: On Cinematic Representations of Labour", on Friday, September 12, 2025. The committee consisted of James Cahill (supervisor), Rebecca Comay, Brian Price, exam chair Jamie Hillman, internal external Eugenie Brinkema and external examiner Mauro Resmini (University of Maryland, College Park).
We asked Joshua about his work, as well as his plans for the future.
My dissertation, “Form/Labour/Negation: on cinematic representations of labour,” is about the medium-specific capacities of cinema for helping us to better conceptualize labour. It argues, through a series of close readings, that cinema has particular affordances for such a project rooted in its reliance on and deployment of one of Hegel’s essential concepts, that of determinate negation. It aims to articulate a fundamentally Marxist approach to the problem of labour in cinema. The four chapters aim at different moments of cinematic negation, expanding outwards: the first is unitary, the second is segmental, the third is contextual, and the fourth is intermedial. It’s all very complicated and dialectical.
I would like to thank my blockbuster dissertation committee, James Leo Cahill, Brian Price, and Rebecca Comay, for their support and, most importantly, for their critical insights about my project – it has truly been a privilege. I would also like to thank my external examiner, Mauro Resmini, and department representative, Eugenie Brinkema, for engaging so productively with the dissertation. My wife Gabrielle has been a force for good throughout this entire process. I found the community of students, teachers, and staff at the Cinema Studies Institute to be helpful, fun, and formidable. I have to single out, in particular, two reading groups: the Dialectics Reading Group and the Marx & Critique Reading Group. Being in a room with friends, arguing about gigantic tomes, seems to me to have been the best part of my graduate school experience.
As for the (near) future, I will be teaching the Western in the fall semester and a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on the topic of “filming capital” that I co-edited will be coming out in October.
His supervisor, James Cahill, had this to say about Joshua's dissertation:
Dr. Joshua Wiebe’s thesis “Labour/Form/Negation” is a truly extraordinary accomplishment: a rigorous, lucid, and highly original contribution to how we theorize and understand labour in critical theory and through films and particularly close attention to their forms. Most Marxist approaches to film focus on ideological critique or the political economy of production, but Dr. Wiebe reminds us that these are but two facets of the immense critical possibilities of Marxist hermeneutics. With imagination and verve, he (re)turns to the missed encounter between Hegelian accounts of “determinate negation” and Marxist theories of labour, showing us how to register and think with negation's positive nothing at work in film across the registers of the labour of production, the labour they represent, and the labour they enact.
I learned so much from working with Dr. Wiebe, who has inspired my own return to reading Marx and Hegel with fresh eyes and renewed sense of their critical possibilities. Dr. Wiebe is that all too rare scholar who finds joy in the most demanding calls to thought, and his enthusiasm for the work is contagious. I will certainly miss working closely with him and the brilliant members of his committee, but I cannot wait to see how his work continues to develop, grow, and reanimate the theoretical purchases of cinema studies, and to shift my role from teacher to reader of this extraordinary thinker. Congratulations Joshua!
Congratulations, Dr. Wiebe!
