The Beauty of Killing Fascism
Description
We invite contributions that address the liminal space of theatre as a place for interrupting Fascism.
Leading up to Fascism’s stronghold, Europe witnessed the restoration of Greek and Roman open-aired amphitheaters, accommodating between 20,000 to 100,000 spectators. With ritual in mind, Furio Jesi theorizes the Fascist state as a “mythological machine” that fabricates “false memories” by turning history into a myth of blood, homeland, origin, and a golden past. Roger Griffin argues that Fascism forcefully generates the myth of “rebirth.” Theatre’s kinetic force therefore plays an integral part in Fascism's germination through the aestheticization of politics.
Amidst the fragile boundary between aesthetics and politics, Walter Benjamin believes that theatre gives strength to “Fascism’s attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses.” For Benjamin, “such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by Fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art.” Drawing from Bertolt Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt (“alienation effect”), Benjamin claims that theatre is a place where “thinking suddenly comes to a stop in a constellation saturated with tensions. ” The “stop” is Benjamin’s Jetztzeit (now-time), a moment ripe for a “revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.” It allows the actor’s and the audience’s “double role” as a critic to serve as a “cutting” of the “here” and “now.”
Fascism’s fear of the “now” is witnessed in Mussolini, who associated closely with playwrights such as Gabriele D’Annunzio. From D’Annuzio’s play Glory, Mussolini coins his famous line, “Chi si ferma a e perduto” [“He who stops is lost”], thereby signifying his fear of arresting time. In fact, this panel’s title is inspired by a similar moment of arrest from Tiago Rodrigues’ Portuguese play, Catarina e a beleza de matar fascistas [Caterina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists]. Here, a woman stands on stage pointing a gun at a fascist but hesitates to pull the trigger. On stage, immediate, unpredictable change can ricochet into uncharted territory, where, regardless of the prescribed script the audience can at any point regain control and even dare to take center stage.
This panel welcomes theories on the liminalities of theatre where pauses give way to new methodologies of killing Fascism.
We seek works from antiquity to contemporary, Baroque theatre, Epic theatre, plays written during Fascism, philosophies on myth and poetry, or other aesthetics.
What is the role of a country's National Theatre?
How might aesthetics arrest Fascism's mythic regeneration?
Is Fascism gendered?
Does Fascism possess a kinetic energy that diametrically opposes a potential energy of arrestation?
What would Fascism's arrest in time and space entail?
Afterall, if theatre played a pivotal role in Fascism’s birth, perhaps it can prescribe a script for its beautiful death.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Netta Sovinsky is a lecturer of Humanities at Yale University. Her dissertation was on "Unperformable theater" in Germany 1800 and how it challenges the metaphysics of the stage and of the political space.
Speaker Bio
Lupina Farhana is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at University of California-Riverside. Her research focuses on anti-authoritarian aesthetics and political theory. Using the poetic caesura as a framework, she is writing her dissertation on the liminal spaces of theatre where fascism can be interrupted. She has presented nationally and internationally on cannibal translation, post-colonial postcards, and the theoretical aesthetics of the arabesque.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Scott Ennis is a poet and scholar based in Amston, Connecticut. He holds a B.A. from Weber State University and has authored over 150 sonnets blending lyric and critical inquiry. His work often explores the intersections of poetry, memory, and political resistance, with a particular interest in poetic performance as a mode of historical interruption.
Speaker Bio
Abby Uphoff (she/her) is a second-year Creative Writing PhD candidate at Illinois State University, a playwright and other-stuff writer. Her most recent short play, "American Girl(s)," explores the capitalist and consumerist constructions of girlhood present in the American Girl Doll toy brand, asking: if a doll is un-dolled, is there a girl underneath? The play is the winner of the John Cauble Short Play Award and was produced in a staged concert reading at the Kennedy Center in April 2024.
Speaker Bio
EmiLee Brown is a PhD student in English at Auburn University, specializing in nineteenth-century American literature, feminist theory, and Southern cultural studies. Her research examines how American women writers construct—and often complicate—feminine spaces within their texts, attending to the constraints of gender, capitalism, and regional identity. She is particularly interested in archival methodologies and the intersections of feminist critique and southernness.
Papers
Speaker Bio
John Wilfred Bessai (PhD, Trent University, 2024) is a scholar-practitioner whose dissertation, Art as a Public Service, introduces the aporetic condition as a method for analyzing public storytelling institutions. His work examines how form—narrative, interface, and performance—builds capacities for civic judgment. A filmmaker and educator, he writes on political aesthetics, democratic publics, and institutional design, with casework spanning theatre and interactive media.
Speaker Bio
Ryan Hacek received his Bachelor’s in English and Philosophy from Purdue University. He received his MA in English and American Literature at New York University. He’s currently pursuing his PhD at Indiana University – Bloomington. His interests include theatre and its intersection with modernism, postmodernism, Black American Fiction, and The Comic Book.