Aims of the Initiative:
- Produce a multi-modal digital zine dedicated to analyzing contemporary fascist cultures and politics.
- Publish original scholarly and creative works by DKU-Duke students and faculty, as well as established researchers from other universities and civil society groups.
- Raise public awareness about fascism as a political, economic, and cultural order, and its relationship to popular culture, democracy, technology, colonialism, and capitalism.
- Discuss and develop tactics for anti-fascist life.
Key Themes:
- Historical Precedents and Contemporary Innovations: What is new and what is a continuation of 20th-century fascism? Fascism in the Global South? Is fascism integral to liberal democracy? And how does it relate to authoritarian state capitalism in China?
- Everyday Life: The family, gender, education, and popular culture.
- Political Economy of Fascism: Neoliberalism, labor, corporatism, and autarky.
- Technology: Surveillance capitalism, techno-fascism, techno-authoritarianism, algorithmic authoritarianism, and techno-feudalism.
- Affective Valences of Fascism: What forms of desire, pleasure, and fear attach to fascist movements and aesthetics?
- Eco-fascism, Fossil Fascism, and Socio-environmental Wastelanding.
- Accelerationism, Techno-nihilism, and Neo-reactionary Thought.
- Race and Colonialism.
- Militarism and War.
- Aesthetics: Fascist and anti-fascist tactical media, visual art, film, literature, video games, fashion, architecture, and urban design.
- Resistance: What does it mean to be anti-fascist in different cultural contexts?
Zine Content:Zine members will meet regularly to develop proposals for specific projects and mentor students. The zine will contain a variety of written and visual works, including:
- Reviews of recent books.
- Short thematic essays.
- Interviews with leading scholars.
- Brief field reports and case studies of contemporary fascist movements, parties, personalities, technologies, and corporations.
- Theoretical provocations.
- Analyses of fascist and anti-fascist manifestos.
- Original illustrations, comics, and satire.
- Short experimental and documentary films, poetry, and science fiction.
