Cultural Studies Program

Julia Alekseyeva will present on "Everyday Antifascism." 

This talk presents an analysis of experimental documentary in the 1960s, especially from France and Japan, through the overarching lens of antifascism. Central to the theoretical grounding of antifascism are two Marxist theoreticians who likely never met, but whose work and analysis of antifascist discourses are profoundly aligned: filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio, and philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Matsumoto was the first theorist to explicitly describe avant-garde documentary as an antifascist form, and his writings elaborate most clearly on the necessity of this genre in the postwar moment, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, imperialist terror, and nuclear annihilation. I compare Matsumoto’s concept of aesthetic antifascism—what he terms “aesthetic sado-masochism”—to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “microfascism” in the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, recently analyzed by Jack Z. Bratich (On Microfascism, 2022). As this talk argues, both Matsumoto and Deleuze/Guattari view antifascism as integrally connected to the personal and psychological. This talk will demonstrate how experimental documentary, stretching from the Soviet experiments of Dziga Vertov to the present moment, becomes a privileged art form that is uniquely capable of battling against a non-state and everyday fascist ideology—the “cops in our heads,” in the parlance of May 1968—and against forces of conservativism and complacency. 

Julia Alekseyeva is an Assistant Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in 2017 from Harvard University’s Department of Comparative Literature, with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies, and has taught at Harvard and Brooklyn College. Prior to her appointment at Penn, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. She researches the interactions between global media and radical leftist politics. Her work is fundamentally comparative and transnational, and delves into the film, comics, television, and digital media of Japan, France, and the former Soviet Union. Prof. Alekseyeva's first academic book, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s, was published in February 2025. This work argues that French and Japanese practitioners and theorists of experimental and political documentary of the 1960s saw their work as engaging explicitly in an everyday practice of antifascism that joins personal and political struggle. In addition, she argues that this practice and ideology is tied to the work of the 1920s Soviet avant-garde, and especially to avant-garde documentarist Dziga Vertov. She has previously written on topics such as the avant-garde documentary in East Asia, Pink Film, transnational animation, Soviet avant-garde film, and the French New Wave. Along with her academic research and teaching, Prof. Alekseyeva is also an author-illustrator, whose award-winning non-fiction graphic novel, Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution, was published in 2017. She has published several articles on global film and media history, in both written and graphic narrative format, in Film History, The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, ARTMargins, The Nib, The Sixties, Cine-Files, Oxford Research in English, Jewish Currents, Concentric, and The Paper Brigade, alongside chapters in anthologies published by Bloomsbury, Routledge, and Rowman & Littlefield. Prof. Alekseyeva also guest-edited the Jewish Currents "Soviet Issue" in Winter-Spring 2022, and is the editor for three forthcoming special issues: "The Arts of Abolition and Liberation" for Arts, an In/Focus issue on Everything Everywhere All at Once for The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and a double issue of the Journal of Japanese and Korean Studies.