“Antifascist Solidarities. Recovering Bygone Modes of Memory & Resilience.” A panel with Cathy Bergin, Jelena Đureinović, Pontus Järvstad, Zoltán Kékesi (chair, co-organizer), Máté Zombory (co-organizer). 9th Annual Meeting of the Memory Studies Association, Prague, July 14-18, 2025.

Today, as a growing number of studies, alongside socio-political developments show, the prospects of a global cosmopolitan human rights regime based on the memory of the Holocaust are gone. Our panel understands the current crisis of memory as a moment in which well-established ways of conceptualizing and practicing memory failed, such as the assumption—so foundational for the post-1989 era—that memory might contribute to resilience, reconciliation, and solidarity beyond “in-groups” of belonging. In search for alternative models of reconciliation and solidarity, this panel turns to the historical past, in order to see how the memory of fascism served—predating the ascent of the current memory regime—as a source of resilience for contemporaries. We suggest that antifascist memory helped foster solidarity among communities defined beyond notions of identity as well as beyond the tripartite model of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders that shape the way present-day memory politics is conceptualized. In particular, we are interested in acts of solidarity across the First, Second, and the Third World, and in the way the memory of the past and political activism in the present were interlinked in international antifascism. What were the subject positions engendered by antifascist memory and what forces of resilience and forms of solidarity did it enable?