AHA Session 143
Friday, January 5, 2024: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Franciscan C (Hilton Union Square, Ballroom)
Chair:
Joseph Fronczak, Princeton University
Panel:
Harlan Chambers, Illinois Wesleyan University
Anna Duensing, University of Virginia
Jeanelle Hope, Prairie View A&M University
Zifeng Liu, Penn State University
Cassie Washington, New York University
Anna Duensing, University of Virginia
Jeanelle Hope, Prairie View A&M University
Zifeng Liu, Penn State University
Cassie Washington, New York University
Session Abstract
The recent global surge in nativism, authoritarianism, and rightwing populism has led to an explosion of research on fascism and antifascism. This roundtable puts this growing body of literature in conversation with interdisciplinary scholarship on Black radicalism, Pan-Africanism, anti-imperialism, and other internationalist solidarity movements. Antifascism emerged in the 1930s as a global political force, uniting movements around the world across divisions of geography, race, language, ideology, and nationality. We examine that emergence beyond the bounds of interwar Europe before shifting to discuss antifascism’s evolution across the twentieth century, focusing on anticolonial, antiracist, Black left feminist, and Black Power movements around the world. Harlan Chambers discusses Chinese leftist’s local-global engagements with Ethiopian resistance to Italian Fascism in the 1930s. They scrutinized the invasion of Ethiopia in theater and poetry, and worked it into philosophical and political analyses of global political developments. Chambers situates these contributions within an internationalist network that erupted in the 1930s, spanning from Moscow to Harlem, to interrogate the promises and limitations of Chinese thinkers who imagined Ethiopia’s localized resistance within the scope of internationalist solidarity movements. Cassie Washington explores the relationship between antifascism and anti-imperialism in British West Africa and suggests that unraveling the two requires considering how our conception of fascism changes if we take our bearings not merely from analogies with interwar Europe, but instead from the realities of colonial exploitation in Africa. Anticolonialism in the mid-1930s developed in relation to concepts and strategies of antifascism. Washington tracks British West African responses to the rise of Fascism, the decade of Fascist expansionism that followed, and how the Italo-Ethiopian War stoked anticolonial claims to independence. Zifeng Liu explores the antifascism of Black left feminists Eslanda Robeson and Claudia Jones in the early 1950s, in particular their theorization of the overlapping white supremacy, imperialism, militarism, and heteropatriarchy of the U.S. capitalist state as fascist. In mobilizing a global women’s movement against imperialist warmongering and for transformative peace, they centered the concerns of women of color globally and advocated the leadership of Black working women, thereby challenging masculinist conceptions of antifascist struggle. Jeanelle Hope examines another episode in the history of the Black antifascist tradition of the global 1960s. She proposes the concept of “Black Power antifascism” to describe how African American radicals—from Robert F. Williams to members of the Black Panthers—conceptualized and resisted police violence, urban Black dispossession, and political repression. Antifascism within the Black Power movement was unique because of its embrace of armed self-defense and impact on Black anarchisms, pointing to the importance of pluralizing antifascism. Anna Duensing unearths the antifascist strategies of Black activists in the United States to challenge white supremacist support for Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s. Rhodesia became a lightning rod for a right-wing united front, joining segregationists, anticommunist Cold Warriors, and neo-Nazis in common cause. Black radical challenges to Rhodesia constituted an important site of antifascist, antiracist, and anti-imperial struggle and enriched Black radical theories of incipient U.S. fascism across the era.
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