Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy

Elazar, Dahlia Sabina; Falasca‐Zamponi, Simonetta

doi:10.2307/2655047

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Social scientists studying nationalism and national identity have shown how rulers utilise symbol and performance to simultaneously create an image of the nation and impose an ontology of the nation upon the public (Berezin, 1994; Bonnell, 1997; Falasca‐Zamponi, 1997; Geertz, 1980; Kligman, 1988; Lane, 1981); in these works, the idea of ‘the nation’ is abstract. In sociology, Victoria Bonnell's (1997) work on political posters has shown how changing images of Lenin and Stalin in the early Soviet period reflected evolving power structures while simultaneously borrowing the form of orthodox iconography to make these images both legible and powerful.…”

Section: Theoretical Orientations Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

The nation in bronze and granite: Creating national monuments in post‐Soviet Bishkek

O'Shea

2023

Nations and Nationalism

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Scholars of nationalism have long looked to material forms of symbolic power to understand the politics and cultures of nations, and national monuments specifically have been studied as reflections of ideological programmes of political regimes. However, these approaches have paid insufficient attention to processes of creation. Given the importance of material symbols as sites through which the nation is understood, I argue that analysing the dynamics of creation expands our understanding of symbolic nation making. Using the case of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and focusing on moments of creation and the actors involved in them, I build a conceptual framework for understanding the construction of national symbols on the ground based on three interconnected and co‐constituting dynamics: spatial, temporal and aesthetic/semiotic. Using this framework, I demonstrate how meaning and materiality are related to one another both as component and consequent in the creation of national monuments and how it is their very imperfection as material representations that provides the context for the nation to emerge as a category of discourse.

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Section: Theoretical Orientations Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

The nation in bronze and granite: Creating national monuments in post‐Soviet Bishkek

O'Shea

2023

Nations and Nationalism

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“…Scholars have highlighted the state's role in cultural production and distribution (Bandelj and Wherry 2011;Becker 1982;Kidd 2010). States use the arts and material culture to maintain political territoriality, create cultural power, and construct national identity (Aronczyk 2013;Carroll-Burke 2002;Falasca-Zamponi 1997;Greenland 2021;Mukerji 1997;Rivera 2008). States also regulate cultural production through various policies, shaping its content (Jenkins 2012;Martin 2017), form (Berezin 1994;Nie 2021), meaning (Beisel 1993;Obukhova, Zuckerman, and Zhang 2014), evaluation (Zhang and Corse 2019), institutionalization (Benzecry 2014;Levitt 2015), and global circulation and consecration (Griswold 1981;Santana-Acuña 2020).…”

Section: Cultural Production and State Interventionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I depart from this West-centric framework to capture states' role in shaping the aesthetics of cultural objects; I show how the Chinese state intervened in hit-making and promoted a new genre aligned with the CCP's ideologies. This may constitute a dual process of the politicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics (Berezin 1994;Falasca-Zamponi 1997).…”

Section: Cultural Production and State Interventionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This article explores the merger of art and the state in a global context, asking: How does state intervention shape global cultural production? Many sociologists have examined the interplay between art and commerce in cultural production (Bourdieu 1993b;Peterson and Anand 2004), and some have noted that the state has penetrated the artistic pole (Alexander and Rueschemeyer 2005;Falasca-Zamponi 1997;Greenland 2021). State intervention is ubiquitous: it enables art-making through legal and financial support, while also constraining it through suppression and censorship, such as limiting access to production and distribution.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The Culture of Censorship: State Intervention and Complicit Creativity in Global Film Production

Fang

2024

Am Sociol Rev

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How does state censorship shape global creative production? To explore the merger of art and the state in a global context, I adopt a micro-sociological approach to examine the culture of censorship and reconceptualize censorship as an ongoing, social process. Based on participant observation within a global film studio and interviews with industry insiders in Beijing and Los Angeles, I investigate how global cultural producers navigate China’s rigid film censorship system. My analysis reveals how China’s state censors use multistage gatekeeping and intermediated censorship to infiltrate the creative process and exert global influence. I then show how informality transforms these organizational procedures into a relational process that is hard to trace. In this, studio executives and filmmakers are induced to engage in complicit creativity, seeking creative negotiations through working with, rather than against, the state; specifically, they practice concession, reconfiguration, and collusion. These processes anchor a culture of censorship characterized by the symbiotic relationship between censors and creators, epitomizing a dynamic dance between everyday state power and everyday resistance. This relational model of censorship provides useful analytic scaffolding, extending our knowledge of the inner workings and consequences of state intervention in the new global cultural economy.

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“…Such was the sensitivity to this bourgeoise hangover that all state photographs of dignitaries from other countries visiting Mussolini would be altered so as not to reveal that Mussolini himself had shaken their hands. 10 In the hierarchical world of fascist Italy, it made sense that a greeting of individuals that smacked of the liberal, bourgeoise egalitarianism would be disdained. But I would contend that there was something more to this utter rejection of the handshake, something that had to do with the fear of citizens autonomously recognizing each other, as it were, in such micro-interactional rituals.…”

Section: Charisma-and Trumpmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anticharismatic Authority: Joe Biden's Approximation of the Ideal Type

Wagner‐Pacifici

2023

Politics & Society

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Sociologists have productively theorized power and politics via typologies and genealogies. This article combines these theorizing modalities to analyze the election of Joseph Biden in the 2020 US presidential election. Thinking about presidential genealogy, the semiotics of sequence and succession favored humility over hubris in the victory of Biden after Donald Trump. As well, drawing on Weber's three types of authority (traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational) and Fred Block's elaboration of a flexible but constrained and accountable missing fourth type, this article terms that fourth type anticharisma and reads Joe Biden as an anticharismatic aspirant. Whereas charisma draws its strength from the monopolization of attention by the leader, rupture, and crisis, anticharisma aspires to domestic tranquility, competence, familiarity, and empathy. The elaborated typology of authority presented here provides important angles into both the election of Joe Biden as the anticharismatic candidate and the constraints on democratic leadership in the United States.

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Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

The nation in bronze and granite: Creating national monuments in post‐Soviet Bishkek

The nation in bronze and granite: Creating national monuments in post‐Soviet Bishkek

The Culture of Censorship: State Intervention and Complicit Creativity in Global Film Production

Anticharismatic Authority: Joe Biden's Approximation of the Ideal Type

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