Prof. Dr. Caroline Kögler
FU Berlin, 22–23 June 2026As we near the 2030s, it is becoming harder to overlook the historical déjà vu that marks the current political and cultural moment – the tropes, gestures, and affects circulating in our media landscape, seemingly echoing the aesthetic-cum-political repertoires of yesteryear. Simultaneously, scholarship has seen an increase in publications attempting to make sense of these current developments, analysing the complex interplay of economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic factors, from which, what we cautiously call ‘fascisms of the present’ emerge. Some argue that fascism never fully disappeared, and its logics persist beneath liberal democracies, converging with enduring class divisions, racism, and patriarchal authority.
This symposium explores how the humanities can approach these ‘fascisms of the present’ as an ongoing political struggle. It considers how literature, the arts, and associated academic fields participate in aesthetic-cum-political negotiations, and how critical frameworks attentive to gender, queerness, transness, race, coloniality, class, an/architecture, and anti-intellectualism can help decode and interrupt fascist world-making. We also examine how modernist, postmodernist or experimental modes of articulation – irony, fragmentation, blurring – may either serve to undo, or channel and even legitimize authoritarian projects.
Programme: Dismantling Fascist Forms: World-making, Refusal, and Critique
MONDAY
9:15 | Welcome and Introduction
Caroline Koegler, Freie Universität Berlin
9:30 - 11:00 | Panel 1: States of Anti-/ Fascism
Zavier Nunn, Northwestern University, US
“Trans Liminality and the Fascist State: Is it over?”
Henrike Kohpeiß, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, DE
“Fascist Heat”
11:00 - 11:15 | Coffee
11:15 - 13:15 | Panel 2: Anti-Fascism, Colonialism and the Post-Colony
Hassan M. Yosimbom, LANGAA Research and Publishing, Cameroon.
“The Literary Counter-Narratives of Postcolonial Africa’s Fascism”
Rita Maricocchi, Universität Münster, DE
“Mnemonic and Aesthetic Strategies Against Forgetting in Our Sister Killjoy and “deutschland im herbst"”
Moshumee Dewoo, University of Helsinki, FI
“Ray Alexander: A White Jewish Latvian Communist Woman at the Foundations of South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Liberation Struggle”
13:15 - 14:00 | Lunch
14:00 - 15:30 | Panel 3: Art and Fascist Heritage
Gabriella Cianciolo Cosentino, Universität zu Köln, DE
“Fascisms of the Present and Traces of the Past: Uncovering Landscapes of Latent Heritage”
Francesca Billiani, University of Manchester, GB
“Street Art and New Muralism as Sites of Collective Historical and Social Processes of Healing”
15:30-15:45 | Coffee
15:45 - 17:15 | Panel 4: Literary Studies and Fascist Heritage
Tim Sommer, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, DE
“Dark Academia: Literary Studies, Fascist Politics, and the Lessons of Disciplinary History”
Jana Funke, Exeter University, GB
“What Can We Do With The Well of Loneliness Today?”
TUESDAY
09:30-11:00 | Panel 5: Fashion and Fascism
Lio Häßler, Freie Universität Berlin
“Make Your Closet Great Again' - Womanhood, Style and the Politics of Alt-Right Fashion Writing”
Elke Gaugele, Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien, AT
“Disrupting Fascist Fashion”
11:00-11:30 | Coffee
11:30 - 13:00 | Panel 6: Leaning into the Break
Lupinà Farhana, University of California-Riverside, US
“Who's Afraid of Killing a Fascist”
Ren Puckett, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, DE
“Fascism and Monsters: the Policing of Transition”
13:00 - 14:00 | Lunch
From 14:15: A Workshop on Undoing
Jack Halberstam, Columbia University
[pending; mainly student-oriented event; part of the Masterclass “Transformations of the Present”]