Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley (eds), Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right, reviewed by Mark Antliff

Abstract

As the introductory essay to Visualizing Fascism makes clear, the primary goal of this anthology is to alert scholars in the field of history to the role of aesthetics and visual culture in fascist movements, while simultaneously defining fascism as a global phenomenon. Edited by two eminent historians – one a scholar of 20th-century Japan, the other of Nazi Germany – the volume has much to offer due to the geographical scope of its case studies. In her opening essay, Julia Adeney Thomas argues that ‘the visual also helps liberate [historians] from mired national debates by revealing how easily aesthetic styles and modes of public communication slip across borders’ (p. 5). This specialized focus on historians as the anthology’s target audience is reinforced by its list of contributors: eight of the anthology’s eleven authors are historians, supplemented by essays by one art historian, one architectural historian, and one author from the composite field of German and Media Arts.