Dismantling Fascist Forms: World-making, Refusal, and Critique

Prof. Dr. Caroline Kögler

As 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.