Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer
Fascination with Fascism: Then and Now
Summary
Professor David Peimer and Judge Dennis Davis discuss the ongoing fascination with fascism, and how it manifests in various forms of art, literature, movies, internet, social media, and digital artificial intelligence today. They highlight Yuval Noah Harari’s distinction between nationalism and fascism, the concept of national rebirth, the power of cultural artifacts, and the implementation of fascist ideologies in contemporary times, and the representation of memory, particularly regarding the Holocaust and fascism, in today’s context.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.