Welcome to the Classics and the Spectacular under Fascism conference hosted by the University of Oxford. The conference will take place on Monday 16 December 2019 at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies.

 

The conference is being supported by the University of Oxford, the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, the Laboratorio Dionysos - Archivio digitale del teatro antico, the Università degli Studi di Trento and the University of Groningen.

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The conference seeks to explore the reimaginings of classical antiquity in the artistic, media, and cultural expressions of Italian Fascism and para-fascist regimes in Europe from the inter-war period to the end of WW2. Whether in theatre, cinema, or mass events such as sports or political rallies, fascism used the symbolic power of classical traditions to produce large-scale spectacles. The deployment of technological means and of the performance medium in fascist events often resulted in a spectacularisation of antiquity which, to borrow Jeffrey Schnapp’s phrase, represents the ‘aesthetic overproduction’ that characterised Fascism’s Italian strain. Rather than the sublimation of the political into the aesthetic in the Benjaminian sense, the spectacularisation of the classical past played a key role in materialising the fascist political project of shaping a popular community. 

Whilst analyses of fascism’s exploitation of Roman antiquity as well as of its more general politics of spectacle have flourished since the last decades of the twentieth century, a direct focus on the wide-ranging appropriation of Greek and Roman theatre is still missing. Thus, the conference will bring together international scholars, whose work has addressed fascism from the different perspectives of classics, theatre and performance studies, sociology and cultural history. It will predominantly focus on the reception of classics within artistic and cultural production, whilst also drawing links to classical philology, archaeology, and educational contexts. The aim is to view fascist culture within its historical dimension, following recent scholarly trends that underscore the importance of detailing the national traits of fascism, on the one hand, and defining its conceptual and constitutive elements on the other. This theoretical framework will also allow participants to reassess the mechanisms, which underlie performances of the classical past outside fascist contexts, both synchronically and diachronically.

The symposium will bring together international scholars whose work has addressed fascism from the different perspectives of classics and theatre and performance studies, sociology and cultural history. It is organised by Giovanna Di Martino (Oxford), Eleftheria Ioannidou (RUG), and Sara Troiani (Trento). It will be the first in a series of events on the theme on fascism, performance, and media (the second symposium will take place at the University of Groningen (Arts, Culture and Media, https://www.rug.nl/bachelors/arts-culture-and-media/). The main focus will be INDA (National Institute of Ancient Drama) and other classical performances in Fascist Italy.