— i n t e r v e n t i o n s —

ROSE SYDNEY PARFITT

‘Mob Constitutionalism: The Riot in the Rights’, Critical Legal Thinking, 12 Jan. 2021 (reposted on Public Seminar; podcast interview on This is Hell (20 Jan. 2021)

‘Brutality + Nostalgia in the Age of Terror’ 28 New Perspectives (2020): 51-56.

‘Fascism, Imperialism and International Law: An Arch Met a Motorway and the Rest is History…’, 31 Leiden Journal of International Law (2018): 509-538.

‘The Anti-Neutral Suit: International Legal Futurists, 1914-2017’ 5 London Review of International Law (2017): 87-123.

‘Empire des Nègres Blancs: The Hybridity of International Personality and the Abyssinia Crisis of 1935-36’ 24 Leiden Journal of International Law 24 (2011): 849-872.

‘The First World War Interrupted: Artefacts as International Law’s Archive, Critical Legal Thinking 15 Dec. 2014 (with Luis Eslava, Rose Sydney Parfitt, Genevieve Renard Painter, and Madelaine Chiam)

MARK ANTLIFF:

Fascism, Modernism, Modernity

>>> Here, at the request of the workshop organisers, renowned art historian Mark Antliff — Anne Murnick Cogan Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University — revisits one of his work’s most powerful themes, criticising the taken-for-granted opposition between fascism and modern art and the tendency to view inter-war fascism as a political and aesthetic aberration.

Mark Antliff, with Patricia Leighten, Professor Emerita of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University (Workshop#2, Melbourne, 2018).

Ruth Cain, Senior Lecturer at Kent Law School (Workshop#2, Melbourne, 2108).

 

RUTH CAIN:

@Nero: Meme Culture, Marx and the Alt Right Online

>>> The inimitable Ruth Cain interrogates the relationship between meme culture and the alt right. As she argues, while alt-right online culture offers the exhilaration of ripping apart liberal consensus, a broader view of meme culture which includes not just ‘Smug Pepes’ but also tongue-in-cheek efforts to ‘seize the memes of the production’ can also serve as a reminder that however disturbing, flippant or tarnished they may be, utopian visions continue to be shared across the spectrum of popular political commentary. (See below for the Q&A).

Lucino Chessa (left), with James Parker, Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School and associate curator at sound art collective Liquid Architecture, the workshop’s co-organisers (Workshop#2, Melbourne, 2018).

LUCIANO CHESSA:

Luigi Russolo’s Antifascism Revisited

>>> Here — punctuated by a performance of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's 'La Battaglia Di Adrianopoli' (1912), one of the most important of the Futurist movement's 'sound poetry’ — composer, musician, musicologist and visual/performance/sound artist Luciano Chessa tackles the fraught question of the relationship between fascism and Futurism. Luciano focuses here specifically on the politics — pre- and post-mortem — of the inventor (among other things) of noise music, Luigi Russolo.

Robert Knox, Senior Lecturer at Liverpool Law School; co-editor, Historical Materialism (Workshop #1, Mexico City, 2017).

ROBERT KNOX:

Boomeranging Imperialism? Race, Accumulation, and the Construction of a Fascist International Law.

>>> One of international law’s foremost Marxist/TWAIL scholars Robert Knox repositions fascism as an attempt by certain lagging imperial powers to telescope accumulation against rival capitalist powers that drew on on an already highly racialised international law. The particular character of inter-imperialist rivalry during hte inter-war peirod may have changed both the targets of this process of racialisation and its articulation, but in doing so it drew upon and maintained its basic logic.

HELENA CHÁVEZ MAC GREGOR:

Aesthetic Strategies of Resistance against Contemporary Fascism

>>> Using as her starting point an investigation into the enforced disappearence of 43 students in Iguala, Mexico by the multidisicplinary research group Forensic Architecture, art historian, curator and philosopher Helena Chávez Mac Gregor asks what a 'material' aesthetics might look like -- one that is capable of avoiding the politics of mourning towards which art’s engagemetn with fascism tends to lead, and hence of making the violence of contemporary fascisms not just visible but thinkable. (See below for audience Q&A.)

Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, Associate Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and former artistic curator at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), one of Mexico’s most important contemporary art museums (Workshop#2, Melbourne, 2018).

KEYNOTE PANEL:

Fascism and International Law: History, Technology, Representation

>>> Three leading critical scholars of international law to examine the relationship that lies at the heart of the Fascism and the International project through three very different lenses… (See below for audience Q&A.)

Martti Koskenniemi (left), Professor of International Law and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki, pictured with Anne Orford, Gregor Noll, and the panel chair, Katherine Fallah (University of Technology Sydney).

1. MARTTI KOSKENNIEMI:

history

Gregor Noll, Professor of International Law at the University of Gothenburg, with Anne Orford.

2. GREGOR NOLL:

technology

Anne Orford, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law and Director of the Laureate Program in International Law, Melbourne Law School), with Gregor Noll and Katherine Fallah.

3. ANNE ORFORD:

representation

Ntina Tzouvala, Research Fellow at Melbourne Law School’s Laureate Program in International Law (Workshop#1, Mexico City, 2017).

NTINA TZOUVALA

The Golden Dawn and White (Inter)Nationalism

Ntina Tzouvala probes the peculiar internationalism of Greece’s neo-nazi Golden Dawn movement, which enjoyed a marked resurgence in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. As she demonstrates, in addition to the instrumentalism with which Golden Dawn has advocated the instrumentalisation of mainstream international legal instruments to pursue its nationalist agenda, this agenda is in fact co-constitive with a vision of ‘the international’ that is grounded in openly raciological assumptions, and centered on the promotion of racial solidarity amongst what it understands to be the different elements of the white race.