Anti-Fascist Worldmaking

Umberto Eco’s now-famed essay “Ur-Fascism” (1995) outlines fourteen characteristics of what he calls “Eternal Fascism,” noting that fascistic ways of thinking and cultural mores pulse with or without the presence of overtly fascist regimes. Rather than delineating the bounds of fascism, Eco’s essay aims to make fascism’s social world more recognizable. In this sense, fascism’s mutability and programmatic nature are a product of the centrality of culture, particularly the culture of nationalism, within fascist social transformation. 

If the precipitation point of fascism begins in the cultural realm, how have writers, artists, and activists engaged in the creation of worlds and futures in direct opposition to the rise of fascism? Do forms of anti-fascist resistance have a shared ethos, infrastructure, or style? If so, how might we recognize such a thing as anti-fascist worldmaking—in political scientist Adom Getachew’s framing as the collective reimagining and creation of new political futures? This seminar explores how cultural workers have resisted or responded to fascism—for example, through the production of antifascist artworks, subversive fiction, or appropriating fascist aesthetics as a transmutable form of critique (à la the 1987 NSK poster scandal in Yugoslavia). Fascism’s slipperiness, what Eco calls its general fuzziness, relates to how extremist nationalism and ethnonationalism are constantly redrawing boundaries and re-encompassing that which resists them. Rather than directly subverting democratic processes, contemporary forms of fascism assimilate them into neoliberal economic policies bolstered by ideologies of racial supremacy, xenophobia, and nativism. How, then, might the production of antifascist political visions through cultural work resist reabsorption? What are the strengths and limitations of the artistic strategies of fascist resistance? How does partisan culture trouble or exploit the common distinctions between tradition and modernism that have been central to fascism’s own attempts at cultural renewal? 

We invite papers on all aspects of antifascist or post-fascist cultural production and aesthetics, including but not limited to visual culture, literature, film, activism, photography, and public performance, with particular interest in questions of nationalism, spatial production, and democracy. We are interested in both contemporary and historical responses to fascism, including practices that speak to and across temporal and spatial bounds.