Keep Calm, It’s Only Fiction! Outweirding Post-truth Politics through Grammars of Protest & Artivism
Research Question
How do new grammars of protest and artivism mobilize fiction to defamiliarize constructions of ‘common sense’ and ‘the new normal’ while countering the co-opting of fiction by post-truth politics?
Project Description
The surge of populism and post-truth rhetoric is reconfiguring the relation between fact and fiction, the common and the strange. While promoting common sense, populism also uses crisis-narratives that tap into speculative fiction. Critical responses to this rhetoric can emerge from functions of fiction itself. This project explores challenges to post-truth politics through protest and artistic interventions that combine fictional modes with defamiliarizing strategies. Probing events along 3 categories – spectral bodies, weird bodies, (anti)utopian spaces – it traces this trend internationally, focusing on protest cultures in Southern Europe vis-à-vis environments of crisis and nativism.
Selected Publications
– Boletsi, Maria. “Rethinking Stasis and Utopianism: Empty Placards and Imaginative Boredom in the Greek Crisis-Scape.” In: Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes: From Crisis to Critique. Ed. Maria Boletsi, Janna Houwen, and Liesbeth Minnaard. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 267-290.
– Boletsi, Maria. “Recasting the Indebted Subject in the Middle Voice.” Social Science Information. 58.3 (2019): 430-453.
– Boletsi, Maria. “The Revenge of Fiction in New Languages of Protest: Holograms, Post-truth, and the Literary Uncanny.” Frame 31.2 (2018): 13-34.
– Boletsi, Maria. Barbarism and Its Discontents. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.