Art War: Making Antifascism Since the Spanish Civil War

What is antifascism, and what is its relationship to art-making? To answer this line of inquiry, my current book project, Art War, mobilizes the myriad resources of cultural studies, art history, literary criticism, and Black studies in order to follow the circulation of ideas around the Spanish Civil War as it maps onto a range of disparate spatial and temporal contexts. The first chapter, for example, illuminates how African Americans used art and writing to connect the Spanish anti-fascist cause with the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and their own struggles for freedom in the United States. Another chapter reconstructs the unexpected ways that Pablo Picasso’s iconic antifascist mural-sized painting Guernica (1937) has been constantly reproduced, recirculated, and reimagined from the 1930s to today. By analyzing diverse forms of cultural production––including scrapbooks and magazines, photography of mass grave exhumations, artistic reproductions of Picasso’s Guernica, poetry by Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, and novels by Claude McKay, Rose Macaulay, and Colm Tóibín––I show how artistic responses to the Spanish Civil War and its afterlives have signified and continued to circulate throughout the world since 1936. Art War delivers a cultural history of art’s potential to advance social and political change, thus speaking to our current moment marked by fears of imminent civil war, mounting far-right extremism, and the desire for a politics that might overcome it all.