For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis
Thursday, September 29th | 6pm
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th floor
New York University
We must take antifascism as a major imperative of movements for social change. For Antifascist Futures takes seriously what is new in this moment of politics, exploring what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the twenty-first century authoritarian convergence by centering the material and speculative labor of antifascist and antiracist social movement coalitions. By focusing on the long history of Black and Brown antifascist resistance that has been overlooked in both recent conversations about racial justice as well as antifascist resistance, the essays, interviews, and documents included here make clear how racialized and colonized peoples have been at the forefront of theorizing and dismantling fascism, white supremacy, and other modes of authoritarian rule.
Linking a deep engagement, both scholarly and practical, of racial justice movements with an antifascist frame, and a global analysis of capitalism, the editors and contributors of For Antifascist Futures assemble a powerful toolbox for our struggles.
About the presenters
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Anthropology, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology. Her third book (Verso 2022) is a study of the figure of the traumatized soldier in the American social imaginary and its central role in reproducing contemporary American militarism.
Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and author who works at the intersections of authoritarianism, the visual arts, extractivism, and the environmental and decolonial humanities. Her books include Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile, Beyond the Pink Tide: Artistic and Political Undercurrents, and The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Her in-progress book is At the Sea’s Edge: Liquidity Beyond Colonial Extinction. She is Founding Director of the Global South Center (globalsouthcenter.org) and Chairperson of Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. She has published in Social Text, GLQ, and numerous other journals and art catalogs, and is coeditor with Diana Taylor of Duke University Press Series, Dissident Acts.
Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, and Founding Faculty Director of the NYU Prison Education Program. A historian of race, empire, and culture in the twentieth-century United States, Singh is the author, most recently, of Race and America’s Long War (University of California Press, 2017). He is also the author of the award-winning book, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2004), and author and editor with Jack O’Dell of Climin’ Jacob’s Ladder; The Black Freedom Movement Writing of Jack O’Dell. A new book Exceptional Empire: Race, Colonialism and the Origins of US Globalism is in-progress, and forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Singh’s writing and historian interviews have appeared in a number of places including New York Magazine, TIME, the New Republic, and on NPRs Open Source and Code Switch.
Charisse Burden-Stelly, assistant professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College, is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, intellectual history, and historical sociology. She is the coauthor, with Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, and is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Black Scare/Red Scare: Antiblackness, Anticommunism, and the Rise of Capitalism in the United States, which examines the rise of the United States to global hegemony between World War I and the early Cold War at the intersection of racial capitalism, Wall Street imperialism, anticommunism, and antiblackness. Burden-Stelly is also the coeditor, with Jodi Dean, of the forthcoming volume Organize, Fight, Win: Three Decades of Black Communist Women’s Political Writings (Verso, 2022) and the coeditor, with Aaron Kamugisha, of the forthcoming collection of Percy C. Hintzen’s writings titled Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean and the Postcolonial State (University of Mississippi, 2022). She guest edited the “Claudia Jones: Foremother of World Revolution” special issue of The Journal of Intersectionality. Her published work appears in journals including Small Axe, Monthly Review, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies, and the CLR James Journal.
Alyosha Goldstein is a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century, the editor of Formations of United States Colonialism, and has coedited special issues of Social Text, Theory & Event, and South Atlantic Quarterly. Goldstein is completing a book manuscript on colonialism, racial capitalism, and histories of Native and Black dispossession in what is presently called the United States.
Simón Ventura Trujillo is an assistant professor in the English Department at New York University. He is the author ofLand Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press 2020).