Brian K. Goodman: The Antipolitical Imagination
Schedule
Wed, 04 Mar, 2026 at 12:00 pm
UTC+01:00Location
Nador u. 15., Budapest, Hungary, 1051 | Budapest, BU
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The Antipolitical Imagination: The Story of a Dissident Idea between Budapest and New YorkHow did oppositional writers, artists, and intellectuals working in authoritarian contexts respond to a widespread sense of political failure in the decades after 1968? The Hungarian writer György Konrád articulated a new set of possibilities for dissident movements in the 1980s, when he circulated a book-length essay called Antipolitika, or “Antipolitics.” Konrád’s conception of antipolitics, as an alternative form of civil society constituted by a transnational network of intellectuals, activists, and everyday citizens, found parallel expression in the work of other Eastern bloc dissidents and influenced writers and thinkers from Latin America to South Africa. My book project will be the first literary history of what I’m calling “the antipolitical imagination,” from its earliest theorists, through the end of the global Cold War, and up to the present resurgence of authoritarianism around the world. In this lecture, I will focus on key episodes from this history, including the famous 1985 “Counter-Forum” in Budapest, which brought together literary intellectuals like Konrád, Susan Sontag, Danilo Kiš, and Timothy Garton Ash. In the process, I will show how the alternative space of the Counter-Forum helped spread antipolitical ideas well beyond Budapest to New York City and beyond.
Brian K. Goodman is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University, where he is also a Faculty Affiliate of the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian & East European Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies. Before coming to ASU, Goodman was a Postdoctoral Instructor in Human Rights at the University of Chicago. He considers himself a recovering Americanist, having completed all his degrees in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies (BA, Stanford ’06; M.St., Oxford ’07; and Ph.D., Harvard ’16). His first book, The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain (Harvard UP, 2023), received the Pamela Jensen Award from American Political Science Association. His writing has also appeared in American Literary History, Public Books, LitHub, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Image: Photographic portraits from the 1985 Counter-Forum in Budapest Source: Human Rights Watch/Helsinki Watch Records
RSVP Agnes Bendik at [email protected]
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