Saturday, October 1st | 7:30pm
May Day Space
176 St Nicholas Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11237
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
Johanna Fernández is associate professor of History at Baruch College (CUNY) and author of The Young Lords: A Radical History, recipient of the New York Society Library’s New York City Book award and three Organization of American Historians (OAH) awards: the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner award for best first book in history, the Liberty Legacy Foundation award for best book on civil rights and the Merle Curti award for best Social History. Dr. Fernández’s 2014 Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) lawsuit against the NYPD, led to the recovery of the “lost” Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance records in the country, namely over one million surveillance files of New Yorkers compiled by the NYPD between 1954-1972, including those of Malcolm X. She is editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal and writer and producer of the film, Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Her awards include the Fulbright Scholars grant to the Middle East and North Africa, which took her to Jordan; and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in the Scholars-in-Residence program at the Schomburg Center. She directed and cocurated, ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York an exhibition in three NYC museums. She’s the host of A New Day, WBAI’s morning show, from 7-8am, M-F, at 99.5 FM in New York.
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.
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 of Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press 2020).