Visualizing Fascism

Visualizing Fascism argues that fascism was not merely a domestic menace in a few European nations, but arose as a genuinely global phenomenon in the early twentieth century. Contributors use visual materials to explore fascism's populist appeal in settings around the world, including China, Japan, South Africa, Slovakia, and Spain. This visual strategy allows readers to see the transnational rise of the right as it fed off the agitated energies of modernity and mobilized shared political and aesthetic tropes. This volume also considers the postwar aftermath as antifascist art forms were depoliticized and repurposed in the West. More commonly, analyses of fascism focus on Italy and Germany alone and on institutions like fascist parties, but that approach truncates our understanding of the way fascism was indebted to colonialism and internationalism with all their attendant grievances and aspirations. Using photography, graphic arts, architecture, monuments, and film—rather than written documents alone—produces a portable concept of fascism, useful for grappling with the upsurge of the global right a century ago—and today. Contributors. Nadya Bair, Paul D. Barclay, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Maggie Clinton, Geoff Eley, Lutz Koepnick, Ethan Mark, Bertrand Metton, Lorena Rizzo, Julia Adeney Thomas, Claire Zimmerman

"Visualizing Fascism explores various ways of tracing, displaying, viewing, and interacting with fascism, examining fascism as both a global and aesthetic phenomenon during the twentieth century. It emphasizes transnational and visual qualities in order to refigure ways of establishing visual languages, articulate commentaries on the dynamic nature of national identity, and form both supportive and challenging attitudes about the global right. In particular, this volume seeks to challenge the notion that fascism is primarily a national product of Italy, Japan, and Germany; rather it seeks to locate the rise of fascism and the global right in transnational networks connected by capitalism and imperialism. The collection contains twelve essays. In the introduction, Thomas examines the rise of global and aesthetic forms of fascism, ending with the formulation of the 'portable concept of fascism'-wherein fascism is defined more by its 'energies' and 'ideologies' than by its local manifestations. In two of the volume's early essays, Maggie Clinton and Paul D. Barclay examine the use of public imagery-modernist visuals in interwar China, and chureito, or loyal-spirit towers, in Japan-to envision and shore up support for nationalist ideologies. In her essay, Ruth Ben-Ghiat challenges the fascist objective to erase the agency of the individual in favor of the undifferentiated mass by examining images of faces taken from everyday life under fascist regimes. In another essay, Lorena Rizzo investigates fascist and imperialist entanglement in Southern Africa by examining photographs of settler colonialism in Namibia. The later essays historicize the interconnected visual and historical lineages within the Netherlands, Japan, Indonesia, Slovakia, and Spain-contexts that combine to create a common vocabulary for national identity making. In these essays, Ethan Mark, Bertrand Metton, and Nadya Bair investigate the actors and methods integral to creating a joint foundation for fascist aesthetics. In the second to last essay, Claire Zimmerman addresses the ways in which national and regional narrative building contributes to establishing various futures, accounting for the importance of understanding the implications behind elements of style and image when examining the visual rhetoric of fascism. This collection will be particularly suited to students"--

This book takes up the stimuli of new international historiography, albeit focusing mainly on the two regimes that undoubtedly provided the model for Fascist movements in Europe, namely the Italian and the German. Starting with a historiographical assessment of the international situation, vis-à-vis studies on Fascism and National Socialism, and then concentrate on certain aspects that are essential to any study of the two dictatorships, namely the complex relationships with their respective societies, the figures of the two dictators and the role of violence. This volume reaches beyond the time-frame encompassing Fascism and National Socialism experiences, directing the attention also toward the period subsequent to their demise. This is done in two ways. On the one hand, examining the uncomfortable architectural legacy left by dictatorships to the democratic societies that came after the war. On the other hand, the book addresses an issue that is very much alive both in the strictly historiographical and political science debate, that is to say, to what extent can the label of Fascism be used to identify political phenomena of these current times, such as movements and parties of the so-called populist and souverainist right.

Has fascism arrived in America? In this pioneering book, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward have gathered experts to survey the history of fascism in the United States. Although the US established a staunch anti-fascist reputation by defeating the Axis powers in World War II, the unsettling truth is that fascist ideas have long been present within American society. Since the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, scholars have debated whether Trumpism should be seen as an outgrowth of American conservatism or of a darker – and potentially fascist – tradition. Fascism in America contributes to this debate by examining the activities of interwar right-wing groups like the Silver Shirts, the KKK, and the America First movement, as well as the post-war rise of Black antifascism and white vigilantism, the representation of American Nazis in popular culture, and policy options for combating right-wing extremism.

What is fascism? Is it an anomaly in the history of modern Europe? Or its culmination? In Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism, Michael Ortiz makes the case that fascism should be understood, in part, as an imperial phenomenon. He contends that the Age of Appeasement (1935-1939) was not a titanic clash between rival socio-political systems (fascism and democracy), but rather an imperial contest between satisfied and unsatisfied empires. Historians have long debated the extent to which Western imperialisms served as ideological and intellectual precursors to European fascisms. To date, this scholarship has largely employed an “inside-out” methodology that examines the imperial discourses that pushed fascist regimes outward, into Africa, Asia, and the Americas. While effective, such approaches tend to ignore the ways in which these places and their inhabitants understood European fascisms. Addressing this imbalance, Anti-Colonialism adopts an “outside-in” approach that analyses fascist expansion from the perspective of Indian anti-colonialists such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose, and Mohandas Gandhi. Seen from India, the crises of Interwar fascism-the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Spanish Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, Munich Agreement, and the outbreak of the Second World War-were yet another eruption of imperial expansion analogous (although not identical) to the Scramble for Africa and the Treaty of Versailles. Whether fascist, democratic, or imperialist, Europe's great powers collectively negotiated the fate of smaller nations.

Feeding Fascism uses food as a lens to examine how women's efforts to feed their families became politicized under the Italian dictatorship.

"The term "fascist" has been thrown around in American politics and culture for much of the twentieth and twenty-first century. It is a popular epithet that is used to brand all kinds of political opponents from left to right. What does the term mean? How is it used? How did it show up in American history and culture with the rise of fascist regimes in Europe before World War II? Why has its use persisted even as those regimes were defeated? Why has "fascist" come to carry such negative associations? In Fascism Comes to America Bruce Kuklick explores the history of the use and meaning of fascism in American politics and culture for the past hundred years. His survey spans everything from scholarly work to the statements of politicians, the writings of journalists and pundits, and its use in popular culture, particularly in the way fascism has been employed in film. His goal is to figure out how people have used the concept to critique our politics, to comment on the history of the twentieth century, and as a term of derision in politics and culture. Kuklick argues the term has almost no meaning in the way politicians and pundits have used it. He explores its use in popular culture to show how culture critiqued fascism in serious work-i.e. something like Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men on Huey Long-as well as in comedy and satire. He concludes that the use of the term "fascism" illustrates how language is often drained of meaning as it is employed to deride opposing views or to hide real feelings or issues. --- For example, he explores the way the label "fascist" was applied to Roosevelt and his New Deal and in turn applied by Roosevelt and his supporters to those who opposed the New Deal. This became even more pointed as World War II began and the American Firsters and other isolationist groups traded insults as they fought over whether the United States should get into the war. --- Among other things, Kuklick is trying to understand the way language is used in politics and how culture and politics relate, with culture sometimes taking the lead in explicating what politicians and even academics leave murky"--

There was no representative fascist movement during interwar Europe and there is much to be learned from where fascism 'failed', relatively speaking. So Nathaniël D. B. Kunkeler skilfully argues in Making Fascism in Sweden and the Netherlands, the first in-depth analysis of Swedish and Dutch fascism in the English language. Focusing on two peripheral – and therefore often overlooked – fascist movements (the Swedish National Socialist Workers' Party and the Dutch National Socialist Movement), this sophisticated study de-centres contemporary fascism studies by showing how smaller movements gained political foothold in liberal, democratic regimes. From charismatic leaders and the rallies they held to propaganda apparatus and mythopoeic props seized by ordinary people, Making Fascism in Sweden and the Netherlands analyses the constructs and perceptions of fascism to highlight the variegated nature of the movement in Europe and shine a spotlight on its performative process. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and using a highly innovative methodology, Kunkeler provides a nuanced analysis of European fascism which allows readers to rediscover the experimental character of far-right politics in interwar Europe.