Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives

Abstract

The sordid twilight of the Trump presidency raised the stakes of the debate on fascism. While much of the discussion has been magnetised by the legitimacy of analogies with the 1930s, this article argues that a rich and complex tradition of Black radical critique of right-wing authoritarianism provides a vital resource for thinking through the problem of US fascism beyond analogy – beginning with the DuBoisian insight that a racial fascism forged by chattel slavery and settler-colonialism anticipated the ascendancy of European fascisms. The article homes in on Black radical theories of fascism developed in the wake of the movements and uprisings of the 1960s and the US state’s intensification of its repressive and carceral apparatus. Exploring the theoretical insights generated in the prison writings of George Jackson and Angela Y. Davis, it challenges the widely held belief that the 1970s stood as the nadir of theorisation of fascism, its degradation into mere political insult. Instead, with particular emphasis on Davis’s articulation of an incipient or preventive fascism, it investigates the theoretical consequences of the differential experience of fascism across axes of racialisation and reflects on the pertinence of Black radical theories of fascism to our current moment of recombinant White supremacy. Alberto Toscano, "Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives" page 2 of 11 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 23.1 (2021): http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol23/iss1/6 Special Issue New Faces of Authoritarianism Ed. Massimiliano Tomba