Extremely Pop: Radical Politics and Everyday Fascism in Italian Pop Culture

Silvia Binenti

This project aims to explore the seemingly oxymoronic nexus between the Italian far-right and mainstream pop culture. More specifically, this research focuses on far-right assemblages of pop-politics and forms of everyday fascism as mediated through material and consumer culture. As the extreme seems to have gone mainstream, codes of the radical right have become more subtle, precarious, and multi-vocal but also more widely spread outside the world of political subcultures. I focus on two research strands that effectively capture collective and individual aspects of political consumer culture: 1) fashion brands that directly target or are endorsed by the radical right, promising to dress newly empowered, non-compliant and casual-chic men sharing the same values; 2) spaces of consumption of far-right pop-politics, with particular attention to the space of the football stadium, where a political style may be formed, internalised, consumed and performed, but not always intellectualised or even acknowledged as political. Through these case studies, I aim to explore how affective and embodied trends in material and consumer culture allow mundane practices of radical politics to act on a pre-figurative level, meaning that political extremism may become unconsciously embodied as a practice within popular culture before it is consciously embraced as a political ideology. The Fellowship will thus bring attention to a new radical right that is neither crypto, neo, nor post-fascist, but rather pop-fascist. While today’s fascism might be de-ideologised, its inventive nostalgia, continuous myth-making, and imaginative future are very much alive, drawing on both politics and pop culture. This calls for a re-definition of the very idea of contemporary right-wing extremism. In turn, a revisited understanding of contemporary radicalism should contribute to a new grammar for interpreting and engaging with contemporary anti-fascism across political activism, education, and policymaking.

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