Here is a new interview, with ideas about masculinities and authoritarianism. It's open access, at: https://periodicoscientificos.ufmt.br/ojs/index.php/aceno/article/view/20485.
The reference: Mateus de Melo Albuquerque and Soraya Barreto Januário. 2026. To take the field forward: an interview with Raewyn Connell. Aceno - Central-West Anthropology Journal, 13 (32), 305-318.
Thanks to Mateus and Soraya!
I have just finished reading Thomas Mann's great novel Doctor Faustus, in a new translation published by Oxford University Press. It's a sober version of the book, overcoming some of the mis-judgments of Mann's first translator. Still not light reading! Mann is never ponderous, but this book is allusive, the writing is often complex, the humour fades as the tale progresses, and at key points (such as the famous interview with the devil) Mann's style turns into teeth-grinding parody.
In fact that's why I was re-reading the book, because the rise of a new kind of fascism in our time has made me wonder what we can learn from perceptive accounts of fascism Mark I. Of course there are major differences - not least, the fact that the Mark II regimes of Trump, Putin, Modi, Xi, and Netanyahu all have nuclear weapons. So we won't wind up with another struggle like 1939-45. If a major war breaks out now, it is going to be shorter and much, much worse.
A one-to-one interpretation of Doctor Faustus as an allegory of the rise and destruction of the Nazis (in the sense that Orwell's Animal Farm is an allegory of the Russian revolution and Stalinism) won't wash. As the book became famous, Mann himself denied that interpretation. Yet there's certainly relevant symbolism here, including the tale of infection, achievement and fatal overreach.
More broadly, Doctor Faustus speaks both symbolically and directly about the preconditions for the rise of German fascism. Among them are the conditions in culture and intellectual life. It's not accidental that the book's hero is a pathbreaking, hyper-modernist composer. (Fictional Leverkühn's musical ideas were stolen directly from the real composer Arnold Schönberg, to Schönberg's fury.) Mann pictures German culture as split in multiple ways, especially between an anti-humanist avant garde and a declining, conservative but more tolerant, Goethe-inspired humanism. Especially in the novel's sardonic sketch of Munich intellectuals just after the Great War, Mann sees the national culture as including a cult of force, support of a strong state, and an openness to irrational violence - 'barbarism' - in support of the nation and state.
Mann knew something about that directly. During the Great War he published essays and a book in support of the war, the German nation and the Kaiser's regime. Already a famous novelist as a young man, Mann was then a 'national liberal' - much like the sociologist Max Weber, who was a captain in the Prussian army reserve and served in uniform (though not at the front) during the war.
It was after the defeat, the abortive revolution and the end of the regime that Mann revised his politics. He became a supporter of the Weimar republic, was openly anti-Nazi before Hitler came to power, went into exile to avoid arrest in 1933, and made a series of pro-democracy, anti-fascist broadcasts from the US and Britain during World War II. He began Doctor Faustus while doing this, in 1943. By the time he wrote it, then, he had come to see the growth of irrationality in culture as one of the important preconditions for fascism.
A weird but compelling feature of the book is that Zeitblom is supposed to have started his manuscript in Germany at exactly the time Mann began the real manuscript in America, and the story of Leverkühn's life is interleaved with the stages of Germany's defeat and occupation by alien armies and air forces. So the consequences of political irrationalism are, in the long run, dire. I feel there's a parallel here to the current denial of climate science by the extreme right, intensifying even as the dire consequences of climate change are becoming plain.
There's reference in this part of Doctor Faustus to the wrecking of German cities and massacre of civilians by Allied bombers in 1944-45, the subject of W. G. Sebald's remarkable book On the Natural History of Destruction. Maybe that's another post.
I have been buying and reading Penguin books for about seventy years. They were both a pleasure, and an important part of my education. The Penguin Classics series introduced me to Homer, Aeschylus, Plutarch. Their Pelican nonfiction series included such classics as Gordon Childe's What Happened in History - I still have my copy, printed fifty-six years ago.
Not that the products were always accessible. When in 1960 Penguin issued Dr D.J. West's book Homosexuality, at the time of a British debate about decriminalization, I was curious. Not long afterwards I went to Dymocks bookshop in central Sydney, which had some copies. I would have been seventeen or eighteen at the time. The sales assistant took a look at me, and refused to sell the book. I was too young, he said. Afterwards, I realized he might have been warned by his manager to restrict access to the book. At the time, homosexual acts between consenting adults were still crimes in Sydney.
It's grim stuff. Many of Politkovskaya's vivid reports describe, in particular cases, the corruption and disorganization of the Russian state, including its armed forces; the widespread poverty and disillusion of the general populace; and the indifference and evasiveness of those who held official power. A very bitter essay concerned Putin directly. Politkovskaya saw him as a mediocre Soviet secret police (KGB) official who had arrived at supreme power in the post-Soviet chaos, more or less by chance. Driven personally by a lust for power, and using the remnants of the Soviet security state as his base, Putin was re-creating the stifling political atmosphere of the Soviet Union. The regime operated through corruption, violence, and systematic lying; the people were tired and apathetic.
The largest group of reports in the book concerns the Russian war in Chechnya. That's a small republic in the borderlands between Orthodox Russia and Islamic south-west Asia. Chechnya has seen a couple of hundred years' warfare as successive Russian regimes - Tsarist, Communist, and post-Communist - tried to impose their rule over a resistant Muslim population. In 1999 another round in this struggle began, just as Putin came into power, and it rapidly got worse, much worse. Military occupation by an ill-motivated conscript army; pervasive racism; carpet bombing of Chechen towns and cities; counter-insurgency 'anti-terrorist' operations in the villages; assassinations and atrocities on both sides; out-of-control mercenary troops and jihadist militias; official lying about what was happening. Eventually, installation of a puppet government. (More recently, that government has sent troops to join the Russian attack on Ukraine.)
Politkovskaya went to Chechnya and its region, and witnessed some of the war directly, interviewed people about the rest. Her reports remind me strongly of the harrowing journalism about the US military assault on Vietnam in the 1960s, and the later US occupation of Iraq.
Then it came to an end. The reporting, that is, not the violence. Politkovskaya was shot down in her apartment block in Moscow, in October 2006. No-one doubts that the regime was behind the murder, though of course there is no legal proof. The regime controls the courts. Politkovskaya is not the last of Putin's critics to be, as the American secret police say, terminated with extreme prejudice.
I have just posted my updated list of publications. The link is in "Popular Posts" (to the right-hand side of this screen) or here. Apologies for the period of non-updating! - I've been working on promoting my new book Trans Lives (see below!) among other things...
I'm pleased to announce that my new book Trans Lives: Social Realities across the Globe , will be released in early February 2026. Here ...
