[Joy, Fear, and the Practice of Antifascism in Czech Postsocialism (1990–2001)

This talk reconstructs how antifascism in 1990s Czechia was made actionable through emotions—above all fear and joy, across streets, workplaces, and media. Moving beyond linear ‘transition’ narratives, I treat antifascist organising as a set of unfolding situations rather than static constellations, tracing how feelings were learned, policed, and contested in real time. Drawing on a multimodal corpus (press and TV, zines and flyers, photojournalism, activist materials, ego-documents), I pair discourse analysis with readings of bodies and rituals (marches, vigils, concerts, raves) to map emotional communities formed in response to racist attacks, far-right mobilisation, and state/municipal responses. Three case clusters structure the analysis: (1) early- to mid-1990s anti-Roma violence and antifascist counter-mobilisation, highlighting fear as both a governance technology and a community alarm; (2) labour and urban struggles around austerity and precarity, where solidarity and everyday togetherness sustained resilient antifascist milieus; (3) late-1990s transnational cycles—from anti-NATO and anti-war protests to Prague 2000 where joy, relief, and ecstatic involvement enabled broad coalitions while negotiating surveillance and moral panic. Across cases, I track emotives (speech acts that do things with feelings), the licensing and sanctioning of expression in media and law, and the embodied repertoires through which activists cultivated courage, care, and refusal. The argument is twofold. First, antifascism’s durability in postsocialism hinged on the practical management of fear redirecting insecurity toward mutual protection and on joyful practices that made participation attractive, sustainable, and world-making. Second, reading emotions as historically produced and institutionally mediated clarifies why antifascist tactics oscillated between confrontation, community defence, cultural production, and legal advocacy. By centring present-oriented emotions, the paper reframes the 1990s as a laboratory of antifascist feeling in which agency, belonging, and conflict were negotiated under fast-changing political economy. The contribution is conceptual (bringing histories of emotion into dialogue with antifascist studies) and methodological (event-centred, multimodal reconstructions that recover marginalised actors while avoiding dichotomies).

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