For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis

By Common Notions

• Focuses on the long history of BIPOC antifascist resistance


• Goes beyond historicizing authoritarianism and fascism (and resistance to them) in a European context


• This book is a primer for how capitalism works in the world today, why there are increasing and compounding “crises” in our world, and how connected it is to domestic and imperial militarism abroad, xenophobia and border control, white supremacy and ethnonationalism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, and heteropatriarchy.


• The people reading racial justice books last summer will be rewarded with a rich analysis of how authoritarianism presently takes hold in cultural debates, political arenas, etc—and how to do something about it.


• Includes a discussion of the attack on critical race theory to reveal how fragile and reactionary fascist thought is—and why it has to undermine bodies of thought that promote equality and freedom.


• Contributors include scholars of American, ethnic, and global studies, as well as organizers and activists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Common Notions
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781942173649

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Fascism Now?

Inquiries for an Expanded Frame

Alyosha Goldstein and Simón Ventura Trujillo

Authoritarian political leaders and violent racist nationalism are a resurgent feature of the present historical conjuncture that will not be resolved by electoral politics or bipartisanship. The widespread support for Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, among others, is an expansive turn to counterrevolution and punitive governance in an era of escalating ecological crisis, political antagonism, and social uncertainty.¹ Responding to the urgency of the current moment, For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis explores what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the twenty-first century’s authoritarian convergence. The essays and interviews included in this collection build a critical conversation that centers the material and speculative labor of antifascist, antiracist, and anticolonial social movements and coalitions. These inquiries deliberately connect multiple world contexts to consider what fascism and antifascist movements might mean during the current moment or historically with relevance for the current moment.

For Antifascist Futures examines fascism as a geopolitically diverse series of entanglements with (neo)liberalism, racial capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, carceralism, white supremacy, racist nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and heteropatriarchy. The analytic of fascism situates right-wing reaction within the historical and material crises of imperialism. Racialized and colonized peoples have been at the forefront of theorizing and dismantling fascism, white supremacy, and other modes of authoritarian rule. Drawing from these histories and present-day struggles, our invocation of fascism places various iterations of authoritarianism and state and extralegal violence directly in relation to racial and gendered capitalist crisis and the expanded reproduction of imperialism.

Colonialism, imperialism, and fascism

This collection’s emphasis on fascism as a global phenomenon, and on radical internationalist forms of antifascism, is intended to challenge the Eurocentrism common within studies of fascism.² There are multiple valences for an expanded frame of fascism. Among the most frequently referenced examples of links between European fascism and colonial policy are Germany’s 1904–1908 genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples in South-West Africa (now Namibia) and US policy toward Indigenous peoples and Jim Crow laws as models emulated by the Third Reich.³ The racial terror and genocide wrought by slavery and colonialism preceded, were co-constitutive of, and continued after Mussolini’s Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and Japan’s Shōwa nationalism. In her 1923 address and resolution for the Enlarged Plenum of the Communist International’s Executive Committee, Clara Zetkin argued that fascist forces are organizing internationally, and the workers’ struggle against fascism must also organize on a world scale.⁴ She contended that fascism emerged as a sham revolutionary program in response to the imperialist war and the accelerated dislocation of the capitalist economy. In contrast to the shortcomings of the Second International, Zetkin described the Comintern as a necessary counterforce to fascism because it is not an International for the elite of white proletarians of Europe and America. It is an International for the exploited of all races.⁵

Between the end of the First World War and the early Cold War, numerous anticolonial writers of color emphasized the direct connection between the atrocities of imperialism and fascism. They persuasively argued that fascism was fundamentally entangled with the form and practice of colonial rule, racialized organization of dispossession and death, and insatiable imperial aspiration in order to insist that defeating fascism required ending all manner of colonialism and imperialism. In 1936, Langston Hughes insisted that fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America.⁶ George Padmore first wrote about what he called colonial fascism in How Britain Rules Africa (1936), further developing this analysis in publications over the next two decades.⁷ In his 1938 address to the Conference on Peace and Empire, Jawaharlal Nehru observed that the essence of the problem of peace is the problem of empire, declaring that fascism is simply an intensified form of the same system which is imperialism.⁸ Writing in 1949, Claudia Jones called attention to the growth of militancy among Negro women as having profound meaning, both for the Negro liberation movement and for the emerging antifascist, anti-imperialist coalition.⁹ In the wake of the Second World War and rising tide of anticolonial independence movements, in Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire described the decivilizing consequences of colonialism for colonizers themselves as a root cause of Nazism and other Euro-American fascisms.¹⁰

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, African American petitions to the United Nations were exemplary of a burgeoning Black antifascism. W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP’s 1947 An Appeal to the World: A Statement of Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress condemned the US as part of the imperialist bloc which is controlling the colonies of the world.¹¹ The 1951 Civil Rights Congress’ We Charge Genocide: The Crime of the Government Against the Negro People likewise connected fascism to the liberal status quo of anti-Black colonial violence.¹² In turn, similar demands for redress and liberation framed in relation to fascism extended through the 1955 Bandung Conference, the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, and the growing momentum for worldwide decolonization.¹³

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther Party likewise called out as fascist the constitutive white supremacism and imperialism of the United States—brutally enacted by the everyday actions of the police, counterinsurgency operations, and the military—and sought to build a broad coalition of activists with initiatives such as the United Front Against Fascism conference in 1969.¹⁴ Activist groups such as the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Anti-Racist Action in the United States, and the Anti-Nazi League and Anti-Fascist Action in Britain, were explicitly organized against the fascism of the racist New Right, the National Front in England, and skinhead gangs of the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁵ More recently, a heterogeneous group of antifascist organizations, initiatives, and actions sometimes collectively referred to as antifa have mobilized against rightwing and white racist terrorism.¹⁶

Working against the mainstream representation of antifascism as predominantly white, we aim to think with such genealogies to further question how fascism as a heuristic can be more thoroughly situated with respect to imperialism and settler colonialism. Our effort here is a provisional exploration of what such a heuristic might offer anticolonial thought and action. In each of these instances, the continuities, tensions, and disjunctions of what gets named fascism in particular times and places matter within and across national and international frames.

During the present conjuncture, when the question of fascism appears resurgent, genealogies of anticolonial and anti-imperialist critique are indispensable for understanding and dismantling the far-reaching entanglements of right-wing authoritarianism. Fascism is a mass movement, rather than a term for all manners of dictatorship, repressive regime, or despotic aspiration. Such movements are often propelled by the so-called middle class, although, in the context of the United States today for example, mainstream analysis often blames working and impoverished people as the populist source of such movements. Fascism situated in the expanded frame of anticolonial struggle can be understood as a mode of punitive governance partially animated by a politics of fear, cruelty, racism, and heteropatriarchy that serve as screens for unsatiable demands for unobstructed access to land and labor. This reactionary appeal to the certainty of authority and order against demonized and otherized groups emerges in opposition to the promise and popularity of a radical politics of redistribution (e.g., anarchist and communist revolutionary movements and Pan-Africanist internationalism during the early and mid-twentieth century) and abolition (e.g., the Movement for Black Lives and initiatives to defund the police today). During the current moment, it is also a revanchist alignment against the momentum of trans* and queer liberation, climate justice, migrant and asylum seeker assertions of life against border imperialism, and Indigenous peoples’ demands for the return of stolen land.¹⁷ Fascism requires violence, terror, and repression, whether by formal state-sanctioned means such as the police, immigration agents, or military, or by informal vigilantism, directed against racialized or other specifically scapegoated groups.

Fascism’s reliance on raw power and rule by violence remains a fundamentally unstable basis of authority and control.¹⁸ The ordained truths and relentless didacticism of authoritarian knowledge regimes are similarly fragile. As we discuss below, twenty-first century right-wing attacks on pedagogies that challenge white supremacy and empire, such as those campaigns in the United States targeting ethnic studies and critical race theory, seek to curtail this fragility by marshalling the affective power of hatred, white entitlement, and disavowal to rally support and to vilify those deemed enemies. We argue that the material and epistemological challenge to white supremacy and empire posed by ethnic studies and antiracist, anti-imperialist pedagogy offers a vital resource to counter the opportunistic spectacle and deeply racist and imperial investments of the present authoritarian convergence.

Reframing and pluralizing fascism through a cartography of anticolonial and decolonial struggle that does not take Europe as the center is a challenge that asks us to reckon with the emergence of fascism as shaped by continuities and ruptures across feudalism, industrial capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and liberalism. Our concern in this book is with the broad resonance and rhetorical salience of fascism and how such resonance is always shaped by the dynamics of particular places and conjunctures.¹⁹ Our analysis thus seeks at once to de-exceptionalize fascism and to comprehend its specificity in an expanded global context. The global arena of racialized violence, plunder, and exploitation was, in this sense, an arena extended through imperialism and colonialism. Fascist movements may appear antagonistic to particular fractions of capital or be assertively nationalist or isolationist in reaction to the crisis of imperialist worldmaking, while still ultimately being aligned with the social and political imperatives of capitalism and empire. Fascism is thus symptomatic of imperial and capitalist crisis rather than necessarily or only a movement weaponized on behalf of capital itself.

Without overstating continuities or equivalencies, we contend that naming fascism can serve to index the relationship among state power, imperialism and colonization, religious/racist nationalism, and white supremacist terrorism as the reactive conditions of counterrevolution and racial capitalism. We believe that insights can be gained by thinking with reference to fascism across multiple and categorically slippery sites. This entails engaging with what Nikhil Pal Singh calls the afterlife of fascism, Alberto Toscano names late fascism, and Enzo Traverso refers to as neofascism.²⁰ These include, for instance, the United States and its colonial contexts of policing,²¹ new modes of racialized surveillance and counterinsurgency,²² white supremacist vigilantism,²³ border regimes against migrants and refugees,²⁴ anti-Muslim racism;²⁵ and the ongoing dispossession of Native peoples.²⁶ The authoritarian convergence today points to not a singular tradition or trajectory of fascism, but rather unveils the multiplicity of fascism across a spectrum of imperialist time-space conjunctures. To invoke fascism as a plurality—that is, to grapple with fascisms—is to reckon with a range of concerted formations of brute force against those deemed enemies and the ways such acts of brutality manifest cloistered ways of knowing the world. Fascisms reference real-time spectacles and structural formations of state violence, a heuristic for intellectual and activist practice, and manifold objects of deeply contested historical knowledge. At the same time, we aim to be attentive to how centering fascism can itself obscure arenas of struggle. For instance, Anne Spice notes, I deliberately refuse to differentiate between the ‘colonial’ and ‘fascist’ forces we oppose, because I think that antifascist organizing often ignores the (centuries) of experience that Indigenous peoples have in standing up to the imposition of state violence, surveillance, military occupation, and extralegal violence.²⁷

Fascisms, organized violence, and regimes of knowledge

What does the analytic lens of fascisms in the plural offer to address the multivalent formations of right-wing authoritarianism in historical perspective? Among the contradictory or seemingly incommensurate ways a global authoritarian turn is currently unfolding, fascisms help us make connections across the specificities of revanchist state and extralegal counterformation. This includes: the incoherent cohabitation of trajectories of violence that are simultaneously for and against state power; anti-intellectualism that is nonetheless deeply invested in particular traditions of thought and interpretations of history; populism that is exclusionary and narrowly defined by race or religion; ideology that is insistently illiberal yet constitutive for certain variations of neoliberalism. Across this spectrum, we find fascism’s relation to organized state and extralegal violence works in tandem with efforts to impose a particular regime of knowledge and aesthetics of power.

For Antifascist Futures underscores the epistemological threat that fascism poses to critical thought, creative practice, and collective study. This is not only a threat to professionalized research cultures and pedagogies in academic institutions. Nor is it only directed at—and produced by—culture industries, social media, and news platforms. Fascisms are threats to critical thought, creative practice, and collective study enacted in quotidian activist, artistic, and community encounters. Fascisms seek to destroy non-normative and subjugated knowledges that might provide survival, solace, and futurity under conditions of imperial and colonial domination.

When viewed from the horizon of knowledge production, the racialized criminalization of enemies central to shoring up fascist domination has deep epistemological implications. Fascist regimes of knowing (and unknowing or deliberate acts of ignoring) are premised on a volatile cohabitation of silence and monumentality.²⁸ With such regimes, there is compulsion to impose and administer secrecy, erasure, and removal of dissent and difference. Fascist regimes of silence and compliance are fundamentally imperialist technologies whose unrelenting condition of possibility is the erasure of the presence of Indigenous people, their relation and claim to land, as well as their modes of governance because of their fundamental challenge to the imperialist mythology of fascist claims rooted in blood and soil. Fascist silencing is not merely negative, repressive power but is rather a performative force that employs destruction to calibrate capitalism’s labor exploitation and the racialized nativisms central to state authority. In its self-aggrandizement and blood and soil fantasy, fascist silencing likewise strives to eviscerate the living knowledges of Black geographies and placemaking. It attempts to erase fugitive and migrant thought born out of displacement, diaspora, and movement.

In its drive for monumentality, fascist knowledge regimes also seize scholarly and popular mediums, in Toni Morrison’s words, to palisade all art forms, create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process, and reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments.²⁹ In this way, fascisms require regimes of knowledge that stem from epistemologies, aesthetics, and juridical structures that underpin colonial racisms. We know, for example, as noted above, that Nazi jurists and legal scholars produced an array of studies based on the racist statutes embedded in US federal and state laws as a way of building the juridical infrastructure of the Third Reich. This example points not only to a racialized fascist jurisprudence, but also connects to the ascendance of area studies and the knowledges produced out of imperial and settler state formation. Fascisms are predicated on and perpetuate the militarization of knowing. Fascisms proliferate a certain regime of study and a cross-colonial politics of knowledge whose vocation is to perpetuate imperial responses to the worldwide volatilities of capital accumulation. Fascisms highlight within imperialism’s expansionist response to capitalist crisis an interconnected settler logic of state-sanctioned migrant and refugee punishment, racialized and gendered predatory value regimes, and the criminalization of Indigenous governance.

Antifascist solidarities and anti-imperial study

Right-wing attacks on ethnic studies and critical race theory curricula in the United States are examples of a specific recoding of fascist epistemologies of ignorance, didacticism, and control. These campaigns cast ethnic studies as a divisive, ideologically motivated curriculum in which the focus on race, imperialism, and colonization endanger civil and respectful dialogue and impose a victimizer/victimized dichotomy on students. In the context of California’s adaptation of an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum in 2020, right-wing organizations such as the Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies and the AMCHA Initiative condemn all criticism of Israeli settler state violence as antisemitism. The concerted reactionary attempt to excise discussion of Palestine further contends that critical ethnic studies imposes a narrow political ideology, promotes a militant, anti-Western agenda, polarizes students, and views history and civics entirely through a racial lens, whereas something called constructive ethnic studies instead teaches critical analysis of multiple perspectives, informed decision making, and respectful dialogue.³⁰ Here, such constructive exchange is emptied of substance, serving to silence critical examinations of empire in historical structures of power and institutional order. What is particularly insidious about such campaigns are how the liberal pieties of free speech, open dialogue, and civility sanitize modern history of the unseemly baggage of racism, colonialism, and empire.

Similarly, right-wing lawmakers and media have sought to make critical race theory (CRT) fodder for sensationalized outrage against antiracist pedagogy. Deploying the stock reactionary maneuver of casting straight cisgender white men as the true victims of bias and silencing, Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson helped launch the attack on CRT, which he and other conservatives demonized in order to undercut the ongoing labor of critically naming and dismantling racism. Donald Trump’s September 2020 Executive Order 13950 on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping denounced CRT as responsible for diversity training that highlighted structural racism and white privilege in an ostensibly misguided emphasis on race and gender discrimination. Although the Executive Order was revoked by President Biden, anti-critical race theory legislation targeting public schools and universities had nonetheless been introduced in twenty-five states by June 2021.³¹ Such laws have been gleefully oblivious of the actual critical legal studies genealogy of critical race theory, which is a tradition of legal scholarship that seeks to account for the entrenchment and perpetuation of racist violence in US jurisprudence. Instead, the term is used to recycle Red Scare tropes of an anti-American menace in concert with an obstinate anti-Blackness. Tennessee’s Senate Bill 0623 (TN SB0623) prohibits teachers from promoting or advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government or promoting division between, or resentment of people of different races or classes. Iowa’s legislation bans educators from teaching that anyone of a particular race or sex bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex. Iowa’s law also specifically forbids lessons that suggest meritocracy or a hard work ethic [is] racist or sexist or that make any individual … feel discomfort [or] guilt.³² As such, the legislation borrows as much from Arizona’s 2010 legislative ban on Mexican American Studies in Tucson as the US McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950. Even as media spectacle and legislation remain performatively ignorant of the specific meaning of critical race theory, the targeting of CRT is most certainly a reaction to the everyday correlation of law, racism, and inequality highlighted by Black Lives Matter, abolitionist movements, and the widespread uprisings of 2020 in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd.

The virulence of the attack on the liberatory horizons of ethnic studies and social justice pedagogies is accompanied by the facile pretense of impartial inquiry. This mode of attack prompts us to consider how the intellectual genealogies of critical ethnic studies helps us build out a capacious understanding of fascism and the numerous struggles undertaken to dismantle its planetary ascendance. The anticolonial and anti-imperial struggles that inform critical ethnic studies are indispensable resources for antifascist intellectual production, cultural work, and movement building.³³ Eurocentric framings of fascism presume certain origins, expectations, and responses to fascism as a sociohistorical phenomenon for antifascist praxis. From this perspective, fascism emerges as a pathological historical phenomenon across a spate of European nation-states—Germany and Italy, most notably—between the First and Second World Wars of the early twentieth century. Conventional analyses of fascism search for underlying forces and structures that catalyzed the supposed break or deviation from the civil norms of liberal democracy toward an elite-induced mass will to subsist in and with violence. Fascism is rendered an aberration and as thoroughly distinct from liberalism, even as such interpretations suggest that fascism stemmed from the contradictions of colonial and imperial racisms perpetuated under liberal governance.³⁴

For many Black radical workers in the early twentieth century, fascism appeared as an apparatus of capitalist labor control, one that drew from the punitive cultures of colonial slavery and liberal techniques of racialized labor segmentation. Many of the radical Black intellectuals who witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe, argues Cedric Robinson, were convinced that whatever its origins, at some point fascism had become an instrument of capitalists with the objective of destroying working-class movements.³⁵ Rather than seeing fascism as a nationally bounded event, the analysis of racial capitalism animating Black radical antifascism helps us name fascism as a mode of power dispersed throughout colonial modernity’s violent cross-imperial regime of spatial and racial control. Such a reading of fascism speaks to the urgency of the Black radical internationalist and transnational organizing.

Fascisms in the plural highlight the ways in which Black radical horizons of liberation exceeded incorporation and integration into the national culture of racially segregated liberal states and bent toward the material and speculative building of a global anticolonial and anticapitalist alliance. By deliberately framing fascisms as a heuristic to read into the Cold War, we can see an array of state sanctioned racialized, militaristic, and punitive practices—what Kelly Lytle Hernández describes as frontlashes—mobilized to eliminate the Black radical building of political power with classes of colonized laborers across the globe.³⁶ Fascisms as a heuristic calls attention to how the elevation of a Euro-American liberal antifascism continues to serve as a domesticating intellectual and cultural force, one that casts the horror of European fascism and Soviet totalitarianism as the foil against which the militarized and carceral expansion of the warfare-welfare state would be pursued as freedom.

When viewed through the register of multiple fascisms, this instance of counterrevolutionary domestication of Black radical struggle casts a different light on the many generative studies that have situated the rise of civil rights, ethnic studies, and discourses of multiculturalism within a broader Cold War strategy of US statecraft to disavow its colonial entanglements with slavery, genocide, and racial punishment. Here we see a shared horizon between genealogies of Black antifascist critique and the robust critique of racial liberalism fostered by the emergence of ethnic studies in the United States. As nodes in a global network of anticolonial struggle in the 1960s and 1970s, the Black, Indigenous, Chicanx, Latinx, Asian American, working class, feminist, and gay, lesbian, and queer and trans movements that fostered the emergence of ethnic studies and other critical pedagogies insisted on accounts of Euro-American liberal modernity as a mode of power grounded in ongoing cycles of colonialism, imperialism, racism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism.

In this matrix, the analytic power of fascism addresses multiple directions. Building with the prescience of Black radical antifascism, the Black Panther Party invoked the term to call attention to the capitalist state’s counterrevolutionary repertoire of violence and control and out of a practical urgency for multiracial coalition and alliance. Asian American activists and cultural workers excavated transpacific histories of racialized exclusion, concentration, and incarceration throughout the twentieth century in a way that pointed toward fascism as a mobile technology of racialized domination.³⁷ In the same period, Chicanx and Latinx movements connected what Carey McWillams termed, and Curtis Marez subsequently reintroduced, as the farm fascism of US agribusiness³⁸ to both overlapping settler colonial invasions in the US Southwest as well as an apparatus of US imperialist violence in Latin America. Adjacent to the emergence of Native North American urban movements and a global Indigenous rights movement, these struggles informed the student strikes at San Francisco State University that were taken up under the banner of the Third World Liberation Front. As Gary Okihiro reminds us, the Third World Liberation Front’s effort to incite a radical program of liberatory study can be seen as a particular working out of an anti-imperialist analysis of US culture that affirmed spatial and ideological affiliation with the Third World and its peoples, not the nation-state.³⁹

Our emphasis on fascisms and regimes of knowledge is therefore another way of wrestling with the epistemic potentials and paradoxes of critical ethnic studies in our current moment of danger. This is significant, for as Chandan Reddy illuminates, critical ethnic studies points to how alternative epistemological accounts of race, or better, differing relations to our extant means of knowing, can defeat the fatal coupling of late modern US racial transformation with the growth of [the] state.⁴⁰ The analytic of fascisms thus highlights the methodological urgency of studying the dialectic of modern racisms and state formations.

In a notable example of antifascist ethnic studies methodologies reevaluating racial liberalism in the Americas, Jack D. Forbes locates the rise of fascism as appearing in a set of mutually-supportive values which go to make up cultures of secular and sectarian imperialist domination. In particular, he traces the rise of fascism in the relationship between imperialist domination and the emergence of the mob as a distinct social formation. For Forbes, the category of the mob—as a political-religious tool—means more than just the masses throwing rocks or burning; it also means ‘frenzied’ armies of true believers.⁴¹ Such a labor allows Forbes to connect what he terms proto-fascism from the premodern religious empires across Europe to the frontier fascisms of the Spanish and British empires in the Americas, and on into the twentieth century conjuncture of Cold War geopolitics and neoliberal state evisceration in which armed white fascist mobs with slave-holding and union-busting lineages have become emboldened.⁴²

At the same time, the epistemic implications embedded in the constellation of antifascism and critical ethnic studies point to radical limits on fascist violence posed by anti-imperialist and anticapitalist work on race. By not presuming fascisms as nationally or normatively bordered, anti-colonial struggle affirms fascisms—and, by implication, imperialist racial capitalism—as punctuated with multiple modalities of subversion, escape, protest, and countergovernance.

The term fascisms gives a name to heterogeneous cycles of imperialist epistemic violence whose limits are perpetually drawn in dialectical struggle with anticolonial, anticapitalist action and potential. This analytic, practical, and theoretical maneuverability speaks to the radiant insights brought about by thinking in Solidarities of Nonalignment, to quote the title of the Critical Ethnic Studies special issue edited by Michael Viola, Juliana Hu Pegues, Iyko Day, and Dean Saranillio. The editors use the phrase out of the urgency to name new analytics that foreground Indigenous territory and Black women’s fungibility and accumulation that might reveal an abolitionist and decolonial anticapitalist politics.⁴³ By repoliticizing, respatializing, and retemporalizing anticolonial struggle to name a practice of working with disparate legacies and logics of anticapitalist movement building, the editors situate critical ethnic studies as a place where nonaligned theoretical frameworks and oppositional movements can be placed in deeper dialogue to make visible what has gone unnoticed or been obscured.⁴⁴

If nonaligned planetary cartographies of radical antifascism and critical ethnic studies do the work of marking specific limits to our current multi-fascist moment, how, exactly, does it represent those limits? The articulation of an antifascist critical ethnic studies also brings to light a distinct set of issues for understanding fascism’s coupling of aesthetics and politics, or what Walter Benjamin termed the aestheticization of politics. For Benjamin, the aestheticization of politics was not only a naming of how European fascism monumentalized ideal types and criminalized figures to stylize political violence and control. It was also a way of coming to terms with the political effects and possibilities that mechanized regimes of photographic and cinematic visuality opened to cognition, affect, and sensibility under capitalist modernity. His analysis points to the aesthetic as a contested category of artistic valuation, technological mediation, and social cognition that was and remains central to Euro-American colonial domination. All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point, Benjamin writes. That point is war.⁴⁵

Anticolonial struggle sheds a distinct light on the photographic modernity of fascisms as a modernity of total warfare waged with weaponized visual signs. Consider the legacies of anti-Black, Mexican, and Indigenous lynching photography; the photographic capture of Native children in US boarding schools; the emergence of war photography; racialized histories of surveillance, forensics, and criminal and immigrant database construction; and the hardening of the anthropological gaze for imperialist knowledge across the planet. This list is necessarily incomplete but nevertheless points to the colonial modes of racialized control of Indigenous, Black, and migrant peoples that photographic visuality amplifies under liberal statecraft. Formulated under the duress of these conditions of racialized domination, the definitions and enactments of culture articulated in genealogies of critical ethnic studies build deeper dimensions to genealogies of antifascist aesthetic experimentation. These dimensions to aesthetic analysis, according to Kandice Chuh, emphasize sensibility as a crucial domain of knowledge and politics; it affords recognition of both the relations and practices of power that legitimate and naturalize certain ideas over others, and the knowledge and ways of living subjugated or disavowed in the process.⁴⁶ Our use of fascisms not only gestures to what can be visually mediated as violence but also brings into focus spectral forms of domination, destruction, and performed ignorance that aren’t always evident in the historiographies or popular narratives of Cold War liberalism and neoliberal revanchism. Fascisms as a heuristic calls attention to the flexible and brutal repertoires of racialized domination that are also profoundly frail in the sense that they monopolize violence and repression with a fanatical shortsightedness.

Itineraries

The essays, interviews, and syllabus gathered here attest to multiply-manifest regimes of fascist violence and horizons of antifascist possibility. They approach the question askew, working through the inflections and enjambments of the authoritarian convergence in the historical present. Some speak to the utility of fascism or fascisms as an analytic, others implicitly or overtly question the extent of its relevance for the struggles they discuss, and still others consider attributions of fascism to be an impediment to addressing the conflicts underway. As a contribution to grappling with the uncertainties of the current conjuncture, we hope this book offers resources and inspiration for collective study and struggle for antifascist futures.

For Antifascist Futures begins with the section Openings in order to emphasize the many points of departure through which to reframe and reorient conventional accounts of fascism and antifascism. By challenging the liberal presumption that knowledge and awareness are a sufficient ground for mobilizing resistance to fascism, and by underscoring overlapping histories and present conditions of authoritarianism and genocide, this first section establishes the global historical perspective of movement and struggle through which the volume conceives of fascism as symptomatic of the violence of imperial crisis and envisions antifascist futures.

The Instabilities of Violence, the book’s second section, builds on this expanded horizon to show how authoritarian intensifications of force and terror remain insecure and contested. Emphasizing fascism and its corollaries as responses to anticolonial revolution, abolitionist worldmaking, and the escalating crises of capitalist accumulation, this section turns to examinations of the aesthetics of fascist devotion, the embodied internationalism of decolonial feminist queer and trans activism, and often overlooked sites of Indigenous rebellion and colonial counterinsurgency.

The arenas of organized violence and volatility examined in the second section are further evident in the specific regimes of territoriality and enforcement of the nation-state. The third section of the book looks at Spectacles of National Security that arise from zealously resorting to violence and terror as mechanisms of punitive governance. This section focuses on how the conjuring of enemies, modes of surveillance, and uses of states of emergency are tactics through which authoritarian and fascist states or movements seek to secure and maintain control. In the fray of such performative spectacles, however, excess investments of desire and enmity also animate ongoing instabilities, as with the siege on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Both the third and fourth sections of the book call attention to the anxieties and contradictions that on the one hand propel fascist mobilization, while on the other hand leave this mobilization capricious, unsettled, and unsettling.

Present Histories, the volume’s fourth section, considers the animate relation between past and present as vital for the ongoing struggle for anti-fascist futures and collective liberation. The historical contexts and competing imaginaries and uses of the past in evidence throughout the book return as resources for struggle. As authors in this section show, Hindu nationalism in India and white supremacist aspiration to claim the US Northwest are examples of how the right seeks to monopolize affective histories of tradition and belonging. The living histories of Indigenous coalition building, antiracist organizing, and Black radical antifascism in this section nevertheless refuse such fascist monopoly and offer crucial lessons and connections for creating a world otherwise. The final section of the book, Solidarity in Struggle, expands the uses of such lessons and connections toward antifascist and anti-imperialist futures. The syllabus included at the end of the book is intended as a resource for readers to further engage in the collective study of antifascist futures to which the preceding chapters all contribute.

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1 On the often-neglected ecological dimensions in this regard, see: The Red Nation, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2021); Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (London and New York: Verso, 2021).

2 Our intention is for this book to be in conversation with other works that trouble the conventional parameters of the study of fascism, including: Samir Gandesha (ed.), Spectres of Fascism: Historical, Theoretical and International Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 2020); Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley (eds.), Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Patrik Hermansson, David Lawrence, Joe Mulhall, and Simon Murdoch, The International Alt-Right: Fascism for the 21st Century? (New York: Routledge, 2020); Daniel Brückenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz RossolińskiLiebe (eds.), Fascism