Alligator Alcatraz, Trump’s “Middle East Riviera” in Gaza, the Epstein files, the buying of Greenland. The grotesque is pervasive in the world of politics. It is so far beyond the US, of course. Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, Victor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, Nicholas Maduro, Javier Milei, Vladimir Putin, Matteo Salvini, and many others enshrine it. Social media feeds and fuels it. It haunts our times. It seems to have escaped the confines of “popular culture” where Bahktin located it, associating the grotesque with forms of resistance that lay bare the vulnerabilities of the dominant. The grotesque also seems to leak out beyond the locations and occasions of “ceremonial displays” where Mbembe sees it as playing a crucial role for how “state power organizes for dramatizing its own magnificence” in the post-colony and beyond and increasingly operates as “one of the cogs that are an inherent part of the mechanisms of power” in the words of Foucault. The grotesque has taken on a life of its own, creating atmospheres and infusing potentially all and any part of contemporary life.

In this symposium we discuss the significance of the grotesque atmosphere – zeitgeist – for our times. Are we in grotesque times? Is the grotesque indicative of broader transitions, as Erwin Panofsky thought the gothic paved the way for the modern naturalism? Gathering scholars of law, history, anthropology, and politics that share an interest in world politics, we situate and approach these questions from a range of related perspectives. We discuss what work the grotesque is (not) doing in our respective fields, how we tackle it and how we see the broader practical / political implications of the grotesque. 

Participants

• Anna Leander and Fuad Zarbiyev (co-organizers)
• Carolyn Biltoft
• Jean-Francois Bayart
• Umut Yildirim