The Revenge of Fiction in New Languages of Protest

Holograms, Post-Truth, and the Literary Uncanny

Authors

  • Maria Boletsi University of Amsterdam

Abstract

This essay probes the political force of the fictional in new languages of protest. It centers on recent demonstrations in various cities that used holograms to oppose the criminalization of protest, state control of public space, or violation of people’s land. The hologram protests fostered a spectral space, in which the hierarchical opposition between fiction (as non-serious, trivial) and reality was redrawn differently. They thereby issued a critique of neoliberal governmentality and an unexpected challenge to post-truth politics. If post-truth rhetoric invites people’s “willing suspension of disbelief” by simulating facticity to produce “felt truths,” the hologram protests functioned as Freud’s “literary uncanny”: they reintroduced the conflict between fiction and reality as a condition for critique in a post-truth era. 

Author Biography

  • Maria Boletsi, University of Amsterdam

    Maria Boletsi is endowed professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam (Marilena Laskaridis Chair) and assistant professor in Film and Comparative Literature at Leiden University. She has published on various topics, including the conceptual history of barbarism, post-9/11 literature and political rhetoric, and alternative subjectivities and narratives emerging from the context of the Greek crisis.

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Published

2026-05-04

Issue

Vol. 31 No. 2 (2018): Fact and Fiction

Section

Main Section

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Boletsi, M. (2026). The Revenge of Fiction in New Languages of Protest: Holograms, Post-Truth, and the Literary Uncanny. FRAME, Journal of Literary Studies, 31(2), 13-34. https://platform.openjournals.nl/FRAME/article/view/27308