EMPIRES OF LIES? THE POLITICAL USES OF CULTURAL HERITAGE IN WAR by Nour A. Munawar (2023) #Article#OpenAccess
"This article investigates how cultural memory has been manipulated in the war in Ukraine, and in the previously occupied Crimea. We argue that cultural heritage, memory, and museum collections have been removed and/or repurposed to legitimise the current invasion by linking it to a grand narrative of Russian power and the recovery of ancestral lands. We present case studies from the annexation of Crimea (2014), the war in Ukraine (2022 -), and make a brief comparison with the armed conflict in Syria (2011 – 2022)."
POST-DIGITAL CULTURES OF THE FAR RIGHT. Ed. by: Maik Fielitz and Nick Thurston (2019) #OpenAccess#Book#DeGruyter
"How does the far right operate today? This volume presents a unique critical survey of the online and offline tactics, symbols and platforms that are strategically remixed to stake national and transnational cultural claims by contemporary far-right groups in Europe and North America. Featuring short, accessible analyses by an international range of expert scholars, policy advisors and activists, the book offers a plurality of answers to practical and theoretical questions about how and why the Internet has been crucial to emboldening extreme nationalisms in these regions and what counter-cultural approaches civil societies should develop in response".
"The conservation and restoration of negative heritage", an article that Ruth Taberner and I have published, about the problem of preserving (or not) the most contested heritage (in Spanish). #OpenAccess#GeConservación#Article
It is often asked to what extent it makes sense to restore a legacy that is extremely negative and harmful to a significant part of society and that has no other significant values that would provide an incentive for its restoration. In some cases many pieces have been destroyed as Nazi and communist sculptures. In Spain a project was presented to melt down the equestrian sculpture of Franco that was originally in the Plaza de España in Ferrol (La Coruña).
Reading "Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination" by Alexandra Minna Stern (2019).
Very well written: fascinating, disturbing and revealing.
"This book seeks to expose the underlying logic and implications of white nationalism and its master plan of a racially exclusive patriarchal world. Each chapter of Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate explores a core dimension of the alt-right and white nationalism, highlighting what makes the alt-right new and old. I demonstrate how it adheres to quintessentially fascist ideas of patriarchy, hierarchy, victimhood, anti-egalitarianism, and racial and gender essentialism, manifesting them in the context of twenty-first-century America."
Artist Jonas Staal published his book Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (The MIT Press) in 2019. If you want to know his suggestive ideas about the relationship between art and propaganda you can also read his doctoral thesis: Propaganda Art from the 20th to the 21st Century (2018) #OpenAccess#LeidenUniversity
"I have come to the conclusion that modern and contemporary propaganda can be defined as a performance of power".
"The very attempt to narrativize and moralize fascism translates what is perceived as the object of this moral narrative, the event of fascism as a "lived experience," into representation, which consequently implicates such moral and political representations of fascism in the restaging, stylizing, or aestheticizing of such an event."