Speaking in 1980 amid the New Right upsurge, Raymond Williams noted that ‘cultural struggle is absolutely crucial, because this is the terrain on which the interpretation of the crisis had to be established for all the other practical consequences to follow’. This Special Issue of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, to appear in autumn 2027, will consider what resources Williams’s thinking, and the cultural materialist tradition more broadly, might offer for the interpretation and contestation of political reaction, both in its current forms and its past manifestations. Under today’s intensifying conditions of authoritarianism, exemplified by the increasingly grotesque spectacle of the second Trump administration, and undergirded by economic malaise, climate breakdown, resource depletion and sharpening inequality, there is an urgent need for materialist attention to the cultural mediations of these crises, as well as for analyses of cultural formations of anti-fascist resistance and contestation both past and present.
Raymond Williams wrote little that directly addressed the politics of fascism, despite his personal experience of anti-fascist combat, and where he did so his thinking generally echoed the dominant Marxist positions of the interwar period. In Modern Tragedy and ‘The Politics of the Avant-Garde’, for example, fascism is treated as a failed or parodic version of a genuine popular and revolutionary politics, a position which, as Alberto Toscano has argued in Late Fascism (2022), may struggle to account for the distinctive forms of individualism, accumulation, technocracy and subjugation that interplay in post-neoliberal variants of radical right-wing politics. And yet, we suggest, there is also much in Williams’s writing that might implicitly or indirectly address itself to contemporary problems of right-wing hegemony, and to the complex problem of what Stuart Hall termed ‘authoritarian populism’, towards which, Williams argued, the left must not be merely defensive or defeatist (‘Problems of the Coming Period’, 1983). His engagements with communications, technology and the media, for example, beginning in 1962 with Communications and running through to late essays such as ‘Culture and Technology’ (1983), may speak to the current conditions of platform capitalism in which ownership and control of the means of communication is not only a key site of political contestation, but an existential problem for the future of democracy. The investigation of changing and competing senses of ‘culture’, perhaps the best-known theme in Williams’s body of work, appears similarly salient, and offers much that might be available to critical analyses of the reactionary discourse of the “culture wars”, which constructs social and cultural antagonisms along ethnonationalist, homophobic, misogynistic, and transphobic axes. Likewise, Williams’s sustained exploration of the function of cultural and educational institutions, and the necessity of their democratisation, pursued from The Long Revolution to the late essays collected in What I Came to Say, might be read in relation to current assaults – often justified by reference to the conspiratorial figure of ‘Cultural Marxism’ – on universities and other liberal institutions. Finally, challenging fascism and the far right in the present require an understanding of historical struggles and the radical and subcultural formations that sustained them. Williams’ conceptual interventions, such as the ‘structure of feeling’ (first elaborated in Preface to Film) and the interplay of dominant, residual and emergent forces (Marxism and Literature), might offer tools to productively interpret historical formations and modes of anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian resistance. This special issue invites contributions that engage with these or other aspects of Williams’s thought and methods.
We are looking for essays of 7-8,000 words from scholars working within fields that may include, but are not restricted to, literary studies, history, communications, cultural studies, and critical theory. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Cultural materialist approaches to historical anti-fascist formations
- Dominant, residual and emergent cultural formations in the present
- Communications, technology and contemporary politics
- Cultural democracy and anti-fascism
- Class fractions of the right
- ‘Alt-Right’ culture
- Uses of ‘culture’ in contemporary fascist and anti-fascist discourses
- Cultural institutions in the ‘Culture Wars’
- Public intellectuals in authoritarian times
- Tragedy and counter-revolution today
- Politics of the avant-garde revisited
- Commitment and alignment revisited
Proposals for contributions in formats other the traditional academic article will be considered.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words for proposed articles should be sent to the issue’s editor, Dr Elinor Taylor: e.taylor@westminster.ac.uk by 1 March 2026.
Timeline: Acceptances and rejections will be sent out by 1 April. First full drafts of essays will be due 1 December 2026 and will be subject to peer review. The issue will be published in autumn 2027.
Any questions can be sent to Dr Taylor.
Information about the journal can be found at https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/journal/
The Raymond Williams Society 