ICONS OF FASCISM AND THEIR AFTERLIVES Icons stand for something, as signifiers, but they also have the general features of objects: edges, shape, texture, solidity, and varying durability over time. This hybrid quality is important because it means that icons have plural lives, across multiple dimensions. One of the dimensions is spatio-temporal: Icons enjoy a first life in relation to the time and place of their making, and they have many other possible lives enduring long after their original users are dead and the social field rearranged. The image-thing may circulate in new circuits of viewers, or be variously archived, reproduced, and written about, reemerging decades later in a new time and form.
In “In the Name of the Cross: Christianity and Anti-Semitic Propaganda in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy,” David I. Kertzer and Gunnar Mokosch examine the role of Christianity and its symbols in fascist regimes of Germany and Italy. They question the old historiography claiming that fascism and anti-Semitism were a misguided distortion of Christianity, and show instead a far more intimate embrace between fascist regimes and Christian churches, leaders, and ideas. But the comparative exercise also reveals key differences between the cases.
Natalie Scholz offers a close examination of a fascist thing that was reborn as a global brand, in “Ghosts and Miracles: The Volkswagen as Imperial Debris in Postwar West Germany.” The Volkswagen was the Nazi car par excellence but also, after 1945, a symbol of economic revitalization, the phoenix rising from the ashes. Scholz sees this as a haunting. The Volkswagen succeeded not by transcending its past, but by smuggling features of the fascist past—residual claims of superiority, efficiency, invincibility—into the postwar consumer economy and its imaginary. By juxtaposing these two articles, we call attention to different modes of iconic afterlives and their effects.
CONTAMINATION AND THE HALF-LIFE OF HISTORY The risk of contamination surrounds us and presses in. Contaminated air, food, bodies, water, surfaces. How long will it last? How much is accumulated from the past, and how much is still piling up, and yet to come? Who is responsible, and how much can we tolerate? The notion of contamination, like the biological threats posed by it, pulls a barge-full of questions behind.
In “Signs of Risk: Materiality, History, and Meaning in Cold War Controversies over Nuclear Contamination,” Davide Orsini takes us to the Archipelago of La Maddalena, off the coast of Italy, where the United States Navy installed a nuclear submarine base in the 1970s. Expert agencies, activists, and everyday citizens tried to determine the radiation hazards that the population faced. But they faced a daunting superabundance of signs needing interpretation. Uncertain data, competing claims; a horde of scientific diviners and soothsayers. Orsini shows the competing ways that risk was assessed in the absence of definitive evidence or stipulation on the effects of the hazard. He argues that competing versions of risk assessment ultimately settle into a roughly shared measure of the level of risk, via a “politics of coherence.”
Mareike Winchell, in “Liberty Time in Question: Historical Duration and Indigenous Refusal in Post-Revolutionary Bolivia,” digs her hands into Bolivian soil, and shows how Quechua-speaking farmers read the soil's contamination, and declining fertility. The soil holds layers, and qualities of time. Villagers see in it the histories of slavery, blight, racial hierarchy, colonization, erasure, mestizaje, and dispossession. These forms of domination impose themselves on the land and through it, on peoples’ bodies, their present powers, capacities, and senses of what they can do. Winchell shows how indigenous actors see landscape, and even a given potato-harvest, as a historical problem. Designations like “hacienda time” and “liberty time” shape history into legible forms, allowing its harvest and digestion. But specific moments, periods, and gaps in time pose hierarchies of historical production and questions about whose, and which, histories are spoken. The ranks of histories are neither monolithic nor static. Reading the land is set in relation to the politics of the present and its competing temporalities of possible change. Not unlike Orsini's “politics of coherence,” Winchell points to the ways in which these Quechua-speakers are pushed to “consolidate” their narratives of history, and of history's presence in the land, through their own ongoing socio-political production.
THE GOOD KILL: LAW, ETHICS, TECHNIQUE Visions of legitimate, lawful, or “good” killing cross a wide comparative domain, from big game hunting, to wars of liberation, to executions of perceived invaders. Illegitimate or criminal violence calls for rectification, reconciliation, and redress, via procedures like confession, trial, punishment, sentencing, and sanction, or at least ridicule, exile, or ostracization. Unfortunately, the markers dividing the “good” from the criminal kill are rarely as clear as they at first appear, and they require honed hermeneutic skills of discernment. How to judge interior states, the imaginaries and disciplinary habitus that might inform the motivations for a given act?
Based on over three years of observing Rwanda's Gacaca genocide courts that operated from 2002–2012, Mark Anthony Geraghty demonstrates how “genocide” expanded into a general social fact, governing social relations and judgments far beyond any specific legal reckoning. In “Gacaca, Genocide, Genocide Ideology: The Violent Aftermaths of Transitional Justice in the New Rwanda,” the adjudication of violence of Hutu against Tutsi moved far beyond actual killing. One could also be accused of being possessed of ethnic hatred or genocidal intent. “Genocide (jenoside) ideology” thus gained a spectral quality, as a malicious possessing force that could be passed by contagion. Paradoxically, the trials may have reified notions of ethnic difference as much as lessened them, since “Hutu” now became nearly defined as “genocide killer.”
In “Adelante! Military Imaginaries, the Cold War, and Southern Africa's Liberation Armies,” Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor explore the ways Zimbabwean revolutionary soldiers identified themselves with their past Cuban and Soviet military training, even four decades later. They saw themselves as distinguished by technical expertise, physical discipline, and fearlessness in the face of war. They were possessed by an ethics, a language, even an aesthetics of the good soldier that set them apart from enemies and allies alike. Alexander and McGregor's study points to the transnational character of late-twentieth-century military training, and how multiple military imaginaries were activated to motivate a single fighting force. “Military discipline,” then, turns out to be far more multiple and layered than previously imagined.
In “Defining the True Hunter: Big Game Hunting, Moral Distinction, and Virtuosity in French Colonial Indochina,” Shaun Kingsley Malarney reckons the ethics of big game hunting in the region. What values defined a “true hunter” versus indigenous hunting, or the general colonial gun-toting hoi polloi? What qualities helped define a good kill, done in a “sporting manner”? Malarney documents the strict restraint, virtuosity, and ritual codes that set the “true hunter” apart, but also, and crucially, the enormous killing such codes justified and enabled. The social recognition of the manly virtues entailed by becoming a true hunter depended on the rituals’ endless repetition. Virile virtuosity required killing over and over, to perform it and to refresh its social value. Tiger kings, indeed.
