Brian Goodman

My fellowship project on the “Antipolitical Imagination” seeks to understand how discourses and practices of Eastern bloc dissent from the late Cold War period have been appropriated by illiberal movements in our own time. The Hungarian writer György Konrád first circulated his book-length samizdat essay Antipolitika, or “Antipolitics,” in the early 1980s. Over the next decade, Konrád’s conception of antipolitical dissent, as an alternative form of civil society constituted by a transnational network of artists, intellectuals, and everyday citizens, found parallel expression in a wide range of pro-democracy movements across East-Central Europe and Latin America. 

My research explores how antipolitical literature and ideas have been translated, adapted, and transformed through their diffusion across boundaries of time and space. I trace the history of the antipolitical imagination from its earliest theorists through the end of the global Cold War and the contemporary resurgence of authoritarianism and illiberalism.