Silvia Binenti

Dr Binenti’s current project explores the seemingly oxymoronic nexus between the Italian far right and mainstream pop culture. More specifically, the research focuses on far-right assemblages of pop-politics and forms of everyday radicalism as mediated through material and consumer culture. As the extreme seems to have gone mainstream, codes of the radical right have become more subtle, precarious, and multi-vocal but also more widely spread outside the world of political subcultures in commodities and places of everyday consumption.

The project claims that this trend allows mundane practices of radical politics to act on a pre-figurative level, meaning that political extremism may become unconsciously embodied as a pop practice before it is consciously embraced as an ideology. The research thus brings attention to a new radical right that is neither crypto, nor neo or post-fascist, but ‘pop-fascist.’