Brian K. Goodman

How did oppositional writers, artists, and activists working in authoritarian contexts respond to a widespread sense of political failure in the decades after 1968? In the early 1980s, the Hungarian writer György Konrád first circulated his book-length samizdat essay titled "Antipolitics." In the final decade of the Cold War, 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 cultural movements across East Central Europe, South Africa, and the Americas. This project explores how antipolitical literature and ideas have been translated, adapted, and transformed through their diffusion across boundaries of the global Cold War.