I. Definitions: Fascism, Neofascism, Postfascism

What is fascism, and what are fascisms? What is the relationship between the fascist movements of the 1930s and today’s ultranationalist and white supremacist movements? How does fascism relate to such related terms as populism and totalitarianism? What are the historical origins of fascism? How and why have origin stories of fascism changed over the last half century? Are concepts derived from the history of fascism useful for analyzing contemporary political developments?

1. Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 2005).
2. Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (London: Verso, 2019).
3. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/
4. Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
5. Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Afterlife of Fascism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 71–93.

II. Fascism’s Imperial Heart of Darkness

Each of these thinkers saw the barbarism of colonialism in Africa as a catalyst for world war in Europe. What is the relationship between Europe’s heart of darkness in Africa and the rise of fascism, totalitarian movements, and total war in Europe? If Arendt identifies imperialism as a harbinger of totalitarianism, her work also formulates an equivalence between communism and fascism that fit Cold War imperatives—but how do colonized writers alternately affirm or challenge this proposition? How does the legacy of colonialism echo in today’s European societies, where multiculturalism has been deemed a failure (Angela Merkel) and Europeans across the political spectrum decry the growth of non-European communities in their midst?

1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016; originally published in 1899).
2. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review, 2000; originally published in 1955).
3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1973; originally published in 1951).
4. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” The Atlantic, May 1915, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1915/05/the-african-roots-of-war/528897/
5. Raoul Peck, dir., Exterminate All the Brutes (New York: HBO, 2021)

III. Colonial Fascism

Writing from varied locations within the European colonial order, such writers as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Aimé Césaire translated racial and colonial experience into fascist imaginaries as total war reverberated outside Europe. Building on the idea of colonialism in Africa—the so-called Scramble for Africa—as a catalyst for fascism and total war, this unit explores historical research and literary works that reimagine fascism from the vantage point of the colonized.

1. George Padmore, How Britain Rules Africa (London: Wishart Books, 1936).
2. Eric T. Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
3. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon, 1965; originally published in 1957).
4. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
5. Alessandro Spina, The Colonial Conquest: The Confines of the Shadow (London: Darf, 2015).
6. Vaughn Rasberry, Race and the Totalitarian Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
7. Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).

IV. Queer Lives under Nazism

How did gay and queer people survive and remember the homophobic policies and genocidal practices of fascist regimes? In what ways have Black queer women in Germany sought to recalibrate Europe’s public sphere around race, war, identity, and fascism—and why, as Tiffany Florvil argues, have their contributions been largely obscured in scholarly and public discourse? In Clifford’s Blues, John A. Williams’s marvelous but forgotten novel, a gay Black American jazz musician is imprisoned in Germany’s Dachau camp for twelve years. Williams’s novel is one of many texts by Black authors that imagines how race, sexuality, queerness, and nationality intersect in the era of fascism. Yet in an ironic twist in Europe, today’s radical right movements simultaneously uphold the homophobic politics of the past while also gesturing toward tolerance of same-sex liaisons—as a way to avoid marginalization but also as a means to promote Islamophobia and xenophobia in Europe. How does the radical right manage these contradictions along the axes of race, religion, gender, and sexuality?

1. Audre Lorde, “East Berlin 1989,” in The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance: Poems; 1987–1992 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).
2. John A. Williams, Clifford’s Blues (Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1999).
3. Tiffany Florvil, “Queer Memory and Black Germans,” The New Fascism Syllabus: Exploring the New Right through Scholarship and Civic Engagement, June 8, 2021, http://newfascismsyllabus.com/opinions/queer-memory-and-black-germans/.
4. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Gay Men under the Nazi Regime,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, May 28, 2021, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/persecution-of-homosexuals-in-the-third-reich.
5. Samuel Clowes Huneke, “The Duplicity of Tolerance: Lesbian Experiences in Nazi Berlin,” Journal of Contemporary History 54, no. 1 (2017): 30–59.

V. Frankfurt School Critiques of Fascism

For certain theorists associated with the Frankfurt school of critical theory, fascist totalitarianism consummated all of the ills, dissatisfactions, and ruptures of European modernity since the age of Enlightenment—from the terror of the French Revolution and the rise of nationalism and interimperial rivalry; to the expanding iron cage of rationalization and secularization; to the emergence of mass media technologies and the science of propaganda; and to the onset of industrialization and the crescendo of mechanized warfare. The confluence of these processes in European modernity permitted Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno famously to proclaim (too pessimistically, on the view of some commentators, including Jürgen Habermas): “Enlightenment is totalitarian.” This formulation introduces another paradox: any “intellectual resistance [Enlightenment] encounters merely increases its strength.” In whatever sense die Aufklärung (the Enlightenment) can be understood as totalitarian, this fragmentary text raises a key and still-relevant question: How do the array of progressive forces originating in the Enlightenment turn into barbarism?

1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007; originally published in 1947 as Dialektic die Aufklärung).
2. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence (1921),” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 277–300.
3. Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (London: Verso, 2019)
4. Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon, 1972).
5. Anson Rabinbach, “Why Were the Jews Sacrificed? The Place of Anti-Semitism in Dialectic of Enlightenment,” New German Critique, no. 81, Autumn 2000, 49–64.

VI. Racial Capitalism and Fascism

Explicating Cedric Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism, Robin D. G. Kelley insists that the roots of (internecine) European racialism run deeper than the period designated as modernity and well into the feudal order and its racialization of the early European proletariat (comprising variously Roma, Gypsies, Slavs, Jews, Irish, and other ethnic groups). Racialization “within Europe was very much a colonial process,” writes Kelley in a commentary on Robinson cited below, “involving invasion, settlement, expropriation, and racial hierarchy.” To take this thesis seriously is to question conventional periodization and historical understanding of fascism, as well as to consider the Black radical tradition’s analysis of fascism as a manifestation of—not an aberration of—(racial) capitalism. “Although the most unbridled expressions of the fascist menace are still tied to the racist domination of Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Indians,” writes Angela Davis in “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberations,” “it lurks under the surface where there is potential resistance to the power of monopoly capital, the parasitic interests which control this society.”

1. Angela Davis, “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” in If They Come in the Morning … Voices of Resistance (London: Verso, 1971; republished in 2016).
2. Cedric Robinson, “Fascism and the Intersections of Capitalism, Racialism, and Historical Consciousness,” in Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (London: Pluto, 2019), 87–109.
3. Cedric Robinson, “Fascism and the Response of Black Radical Theorists,” in Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (London: Pluto, 2019), 149–159.
4. Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Afterlife of Fascism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 71–93.
5. Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?,” Boston Review, June 12, 2017, https://bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-introduction-race-capitalism-justice/
6. Aaron B. Retish, “‘Black Radicals Not Only Anticipated the Rise of Fascism; They Resisted It before It Was Considered a Crisis’: An Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley,” The Volunteer, November 14, 2020, https://albavolunteer.org/2020/11/robin-d-g-kelley-on-fascism-then-and-now/
7. Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism,” Boston Review, October 28, 2020, https://bostonreview.net/articles/alberto-toscano-tk/

VII. The Antifascist Left in the United States

In the 1930s, the antifascist Left in the United States adopted a formidable stance on and opposition to Nazism and its imitators in the United States and globally. As the literary historian Alan Wald shows, questions of race, gender, and masculinity permeate these movements in the wake of World War II. How did the antifascist front enable a self-conscious rearticulation of Jewish masculinity after the Holocaust? How did Black Americans—constrained by the federal government in their ability to join the fight against Italy’s colonial fascist occupation in Ethiopia—nonetheless participate in antifascist struggles in the international realm? What solidarities and tensions flowed from Black and Jewish cooperation in antifascist struggles?

1. Ann Petry, The Street (Boston: Mariner Books, 2020; originally published in 1940).
2. Richard Wright, Pagan Spain (New York: HarperCollins, 2010; originally published in 1957).
3. Alan Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
4. Bill Mullen and Christopher Vials, eds., The US Anti-Fascism Reader (London: Verso, 2020).
5. Robin D. G. Kelley, “This Ain’t Ethiopia, But It’ll Do: African-Americans and the Spanish Civil War,” in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 123–160.
6. Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (London: Verso, 2008).

VIII. It Happened Here: Trumpism and Global White Nationalism

Novelists such as Philip K. Dick and Philip Roth have brilliantly created counterfactual scenarios in which fascism prevails in the United States: Nazi Germany conquers the United States in World War II (Dick) or the Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1932 (Roth). In Nazi Literature in the Americas, Roberto Bolaño constructs a mock-scholarly tableau of vignettes that link fascist writers and artists in the Americas north and south of the equator. But how do we understand these fictional works—which imagine fascism in the Americas as counterfactual history—in relation to critical histories that identify elements of U.S. history as secret sharers of the fascist ethos?

1. Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (New York: Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011; originally published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1962).
2. Philip Roth, The Plot against America (New York: Vintage, 2005).
3. Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas (New York: New Directions, 2009).
4. Arundhati Roy, Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020).
5. Rich Benjamin, “Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through with Fascism,” The Intercept, September 27, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/09/27/trump-supporters-fascism-election/
6. Jonathan M. Katz, “It Happened Here,” Foreign Policy, January 9, 2021.
   https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/09/it-happened-here-live/
7. Priya Satya, “Fascism and Analogies—British and American, Past and Present,” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 16, 2021, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/fascism-analogies-british-american-past-present/

Vaughn Rasberry is an associate professor of English and comparative studies in race and ethnicity at Stanford University, where he teaches and researches literature of the African Diaspora. He is also the author of Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2016) and recipient of the Ralph Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.