What does Fascism look like or how does it sound like?nnThis course aims to engage students with the signs, symbols, myths, and media constructs of fascism as a style of thinking and feeling. Fascist ideologies keep recurring through diverse and new aesthetics, mediums, and myths of purity, strength and revenge. This course requires students to explore the ways in which fascist regimes and parties express themselves visually, rhetorically and sonically and how these appeal to the public.nnIn the late 2020s, with Gaza under bombardment, anti-immigration policies in the US, wars in Ukraine and the Sudan, ongoing struggles in Morocco over the ‘Sahara’ region and so on, the language of dehumanization, siege, and “cleansing” circulate globally in memes, posters, songs, and daily social media feeds. Fascist aesthetics of armored bodies, heroic victims, faceless enemies, apocalyptic battles appear in fashion, music videos, films and video games that are mostly detached from their histories and contexts. Learning to read, analyse and critique these signs, myths, and intertextual elements are a necessity for students of communication and design in particular and university students in general. This course begins with foundations of semiotic theory starting from Saussure’s structuralist notions to Barthes’ account on mythologies and regimes of power, to Kristeva’s intertextuality and abjection which appear in fascist media and art. Through engagement with the course materials, assessments and class tasks, students will learn how signs become myths, mutated and can be re-made. Moreover, students will familiarize themselves with the semiotics of specifically anti-fascist movements and their representations in the media as counterparts for fascist ideologies.
