Scott Henkel, assistant professor of English, will speak on “Censorship and Cooperation in Salt of the Earth” at noon Wednesday, Oct. 10, in the IASH Conference Room, LN-1106. He will focus on the struggles of the Latina protagonists in Herbert Biberman’s suppressed film Salt of the Earth, a fictional retelling of a miners’ strike in New Mexico in which the spouses and sisters of the miners take over the strike after the men have been threatened with arrest. The characters in the film face a choice: to maintain a traditional gender hierarchy and lose the strike, or to adopt a more horizontal gender relationship, and have the potential to win. By reading the content and context of the film — Biberman was one of the “Hollywood Ten” blacklistees — Henkel argues that, contrary to much recent research on the topic, free speech is linked to problems of cooperation, and moments when that cooperation reaches its limits.
