Popular Culture against Fascism
- Sitzung, 4 7 2017
The fourth meeting of Academy’s reading group is dedicated to the political potential of popular culture. We analyze how movies, computer games, videoclips and TV series express political ideas and in which way they can promote anti-fascist agenda. Our examples will include South Park, Beyonce, Kendrick Lamar, Wolfenstein. The New Order and Iron Sky 2. The guests of the meeting, Hubert Gromny and Jan Sowa, present their research in the field, especially a modification of a stategy war video game „Hearts of Iron IV“. The game focuses on World War II, allowing the players to take control of any nation in the world and lead them to victory against the major powers at the time. The modification created by our guests – „Anarcho-Communist Republic of Intermarium“ – presents an alternative political scenario in which Rosa Luxemburg survives the failed Spartacist Uprising in Berlin and escapes to Poland with a group of progressive communists and anarchists to start a political movement.
The meeting is moderated by the Academy’s curator Aneta Rostkowska.
Social theorist and author JAN SOWA holds a PhD in sociology and a professorship in cultural studies. His research assignments took him to several universities in Poland and abroad, recently to Warsaw University and University of São Paulo. Sowa is the author and editor of numerous publications, including the volume of essays A Joy Forever: Political Economy of Social Creativity (MayFlyBooks/Ephemera 2014). He lives in Warsaw.
Hubert Gromny is artist, theorist, researcher and writer investigating intersections between art, theory and popular culture in order to unfold political significance of culture shaping processes. Gromny is a graduate of Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and Institute of Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He lives in Reykjavík.
Bibliography:
John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, Chapter 7 (Poltics), London/New York: Routledge 1989, pp. 159-194.
Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, third edition, transl. By Theodore P. Wolfe, Chapter 2 (Authoritarian Family Ideology and the Mass Psychology of Fascism), New York: Orgone Institute Press 1946 (1933), pp. 28-62.
Richard Shusterman, Form and Funk: The Aesthetic Challenge of Popular Art, in: Shusterman: Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living beauty, Rethinking Art, Oxford: Blackwell 1992, pp. 169-201. https://www.academia.edu/3048872/FormandFunkTheAestheticChallengeofPopularArt
