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 volume presents ground-breaking analyses of how the far right represents natural environments and environmentalism around the globe. Images are not simply pervasive in our increasingly visual culture – they are a means of proposing worlds to viewers. Accordingly, the book approaches the visual not as something ‘extra’ or ‘illustrative’ but as a key means of producing identities and ‘doing politics’. Putting visuality centre stage and covering political parties and non-party actors in Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Europe and the United States, contributors demonstrate the various ways in which the far right articulates natural environments and the rampant environmental crises of the twenty-first century, providing essential insights into such multifaceted politics.

Investigating the central role that theories of the visual arts and creativity played in the development of fascism in France, Mark Antliff examines the aesthetic dimension of fascist myth-making within the history of the avant-garde. Between 1909 and 1939, a surprising array of modernists were implicated in this project, including such well-known figures as the symbolist painter Maurice Denis, the architects Le Corbusier and Auguste Perret, the sculptors Charles Despiau and Aristide Maillol, the “New Vision” photographer Germaine Krull, and the fauve Maurice Vlaminck. Antliff considers three French fascists: Georges Valois, Philippe Lamour, and Thierry Maulnier, demonstrating how they appropriated the avant-garde aesthetics of cubism, futurism, surrealism, and the so-called Retour à l’Ordre (“Return to Order”), and, in one instance, even defined the “dynamism” of fascist ideology in terms of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage. For these fascists, modern art was the mythic harbinger of a regenerative revolution that would overthrow existing governmental institutions, inaugurate an anticapitalist new order, and awaken the creative and artistic potential of the fascist “new man.” In formulating the nexus of fascist ideology, aesthetics, and violence, Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier drew primarily on the writings of the French political theorist Georges Sorel, whose concept of revolutionary myth proved central to fascist theories of cultural and national regeneration in France. Antliff analyzes the impact of Sorel’s theory of myth on Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier. Valois created the first fascist movement in France; Lamour, a follower of Valois, established the short-lived Parti Fasciste Révolutionnaire in 1928 before founding two fascist-oriented journals; Maulnier forged a theory of fascism under the auspices of the journals Combat and Insurgé.

Originally published in Italian in 1980, Migone covers the relationship between the United States and Italy during the interwar years.

In Transatlantic Fascism, Federico Finchelstein traces the intellectual and cultural connections between Argentine and Italian fascisms, showing how fascism circulates transnationally. From the early 1920s well into the Second World War, Mussolini tried to export Italian fascism to Argentina, the “most Italian” country outside of Italy. (Nearly half the country’s population was of Italian descent.) Drawing on extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Finchelstein examines Italy’s efforts to promote fascism in Argentina by distributing bribes, sending emissaries, and disseminating propaganda through film, radio, and print. He investigates how Argentina’s political culture was in turn transformed as Italian fascism was appropriated, reinterpreted, and resisted by the state and the mainstream press, as well as by the Left, the Right, and the radical Right. As Finchelstein explains, nacionalismo, the right-wing ideology that developed in Argentina, was not the wholesale imitation of Italian fascism that Mussolini wished it to be. Argentine nacionalistas conflated Catholicism and fascism, making the bold claim that their movement had a central place in God’s designs for their country. Finchelstein explores the fraught efforts of nationalistas to develop a “sacred” ideological doctrine and political program, and he scrutinizes their debates about Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, imperialism, anti-Semitism, and anticommunism. Transatlantic Fascism shows how right-wing groups constructed a distinctive Argentine fascism by appropriating some elements of the Italian model and rejecting others. It reveals the specifically local ways that a global ideology such as fascism crossed national borders.

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.