Five Years. Two Study Groups. Part One.
antifascist newsletter

19 October 2024
Sat 12-6pm

Call for involvement in a third issue of Five Years: anti-fascist newsletter.
How, what, who would constitute this involvement. What would it do?

background:
Five Years: Fragments for an anti-fascist newsletter
A collaborative project initiated by Five Years member
Esther Planas as an invitation to Five Years members.

Issue 1: ‘Fragments for an Ant-Fascist Newsletter’, which was produced in response to an open call for contributions to the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest #11, was completed at the end of February 2020, on the cusp of the global Covid 19 Pandemic.

An experimentation with processes of editorial assemblage, foregrounding testimonial and compressed, elliptical accounts of personal experience. Through an incipient praxis in common, the aim was to interrogate fascism and its socio-political genealogies, tracing its occult persistence in the governments and political structures of the West. The hope was that this work would help to articulate modes of personal resistance, articulating a struggle which is played out both within the micro-political, psychological dimension and in the arena of social relations or political oppression.

Issue 2: continued our research in the same spirit, but with the focus on a single, more extended text. Esi Eshun’s ‘A Fever Dream’ unfolds directly from an intensely embodied account of self-isolation. Written during the first wave of the Pandemic, the text opens out onto the biopolitical as the writer grapples with the virus as a kind of malevolent and mutable floating signifier.

The motif of the dream plays out on a number of levels: there is a dreamlike experiential and semantic drift as this “fictive space between reality and the seemingly more fantastical variant we’re living through” is traversed. But dreaming’s archaic function as prophecy or portent is also urgently invoked, in particular with respect to the consequences of the Covid crisis for the environment and in relation to racial justice.

Five Years’ Study Group on Issues 1&2:
Edward Dorrian, Esi Eshun, Marc Hulson, Liz Murray, Esther Planas