The rise of political martyrdom in the contemporary world is not a new phenomenon but can be traced back to at least the early Twentieth Century with the rise of European Fascist movements. Both they, and the fascist-like movements of today, share a cluster of characteristics that allow for fruitful comparisons of the ways in which martyrdom spectacles are used to communicate with constituent populations, facilitate a culture of violence, perpetuate their revolutionary zeal and demonstrate the characteristics of the ideal citizen. Examining four major movements; Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Palestinian Hamas and the modern Iran, this dissertation argues that 1) the use of martyrdom by today’s fascist-like fundamentalists is not unique, but follows a well-known path taken by the earlier fascist movements of the twentieth century; 2) martyrdom spectacles can be used to build support within the population and present a narrative of the ideal citizen; 3) there are different uses of martyrdom spectacles between the regime phase and the movement phase for both fascist and fascist-like movements. By exploring the relationship between martyrdom spectacles and their disciplining nature, we can

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Spectacle, Sacrifice and the State: The Legacy of European Fascism and the Revival of Martyrdom in the Modern World

The trial and execution of Louis XVI served as a founding act of French republican democracy. It was also a scene of irregular justice: no legal warrants or procedural precedents existed for bringing a king to justice before the law. This essay describes how Jacobins crafted a new language of popular agency to overcome that obstacle—the language of redemptive violence. Although redemptive violence had roots in prerevolutionary notions of penal justice and social cohesion, its philosophical ambitions were revolutionary and modern. Analyzing that language illuminates how republican democracy weaponized a distinctive ideology of extralegal violence at its origins. It also helps explain redemptive violence's enduring appeal during and after the French Revolution.

The People as a Natural Disaster: Redemptive Violence in Jacobin Political Thought

This article analyzes forms of cultural production that opposed Peronism in Argentina between 1950 and 1955 in the context of the Cold War. It focuses on representations created by Argentina’s Socialist Party. This party created a series of discourses opposed to Peronism using local and transnational categories that were framed by the country’s own view of the Cold War. The Socialist Party used these discourses to stigmatize Peron’s Argentina as a species of totalitarian state. This article sought to go beyond the traditional perspectives of Cold War historiography, whose focus is on diplomatic and military history and the bulk of whose analysis is devoted to dissecting the United States’ attempts to establish hegemony over Latin America or to describing the phenomenon of justicialismo’s “third position.” This article, on the other hand, sought to use cultural analysis to explore Latin America’s own agency in its adoption of language pertaining to the early Cold War period. Socialists crafted a stylized, and sometimes exaggerated, discourse in which imagery belonging to fascism and, to a lesser extent, Stalinism after the rise of the Iron Curtain, was combined with the local figure of nineteenth century governor Juan Manuel de Rosas.

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Representations of Peronism as totalitarianism in the view of the Socialist Party during a Cold War period in Argentina (1950-1955)

Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky's texts of the 1920s offer compelling examples of the tensions endemic to aesthetic modernism and inherent in Jewish nationalist discourse during the interwar period. This essay discusses Jabotinsky's Atlas (1925), his unproduced film script A Galilean Romance (1924–1926), and his anthemic poem "Two Banks Has the Jordan" (1929). While the ideological value of the works examined is self-evident, the artistic features of Jabotinsky's work have received scant attention. This essay reveals Jabotinsky's indebtedness to themes and techniques identified with early European literary modernisms and their associated socio-political contexts. The article concludes that scholars can profitably locate Jabotinsky's creative output of the 1920s within the nexus of early aesthetic modernism and collectivist nationalism.

Jewish Geographies: Jabotinsky and Modernism

Gabriel Rockhill’s ambitious book responds to an acute need to rethink the relationships between aesthetics and politics. Radical History and the Politics of Art is an innovative, interdisciplinary attempt at stepping out of discontinuist models of the history of art and ontological approaches to understanding art’s ties with the sociopolitical. It challenges theorists and critics alike to abandon the “classic, common sense trinity—what is art? what is politics? what is their relation?” and accept fully the idea that these concepts have no determinable, transhistorical essence (3). They are always in flux, always a matter of renegotiation, and their relations defy the binary logic that still dominates aesthetic debates (complicity vs. resistance; authentic vs. inauthentic; form vs. context; causality vs. indeterminacy; consubstantiality vs. opposition, etc.). Rockhill relies on a threefold conceptual framework. The first fundamental principle motivating the book is an attack on what he terms the ontological illusion, that is, the widespread belief that art and politics are discrete entities with a fixed essence and a definable relationship.1 The ontological illusion implies that there are some determinable criteria for what counts as authentic art and politics. Secondly, Rockhill calls for a broader understanding of the political efficacy of art works. The relation between art and politics has frequently been framed in terms of causality and success or failure. Art is either expected to create direct sociopolitical change or forced into isolation for its inability to do so. However, both of these positions rely on what Rockhill calls the talisman complex, the assumption that, in order to be political, works of art in themselves must have quasi-magical effects in the world. The talisman complex thus supports fusional and oppositional aesthetic theories, which both hold a reductive view of the political context and possibilities of art. Finally, Rockhill advocates for thinking the relationships between art and politics in the context of radical history by paying attention to the intricate temporal, geographic and social variations in historical practices. Radical history eschews discontinuous periods or epochs, inviting us instead to examine fluid, overlapping phases that are subject to reactivation and projection.2 Three minor conceptual threads also subtend the book’s discussions. Rockhill observes that thinkers often focus on a particular artistic tradition, assume it to be homogeneous, and treat it as grounds for making universal claims. He argues that this historical hegemony must be countered through careful attention to both geographic diversity and social

Jonathan P. Eburne

Papers

Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909-1939, by Mark Antliff