Abstract
The Black Antifascist Tradition is a powerful work of reclamation. The book organises twentieth-century Black radical histories in the US to instantiate a Black anti-fascist tradition in a manner which reframes these anti-racist struggles and reinterprets what is meant by the term ‘fascism’ itself. The subtitle of the book ‘fighting back from anti-lynching to abolition’ clearly signals that the Black anti-fascist tradition is not structured around the concepts of interwar European fascism that have dominated anti-fascist studies. Both the historiography and the spatial co-ordinates of fascism are upturned when viewed through the Black radical tradition. The authors cite Cedric Robinson’s claim that fascism, from ‘the perspective of non-Western peoples’, has a long genealogy and is ‘no more an historical aberration than colonialism, the slave trade and slavery’ (p. 7).
The Black anti-fascist tradition is multifaceted in this book but is also crucially often centred around the axes of race and class. Thus, throughout the book, the threat of fascism is underpinned by ‘other subcurrents of racial capitalism’ (p. 19). The authors’ understanding of fascism is clearly within both the Marxist and Black radical traditions which name fascism not as liberal democracy’s other but as its symptom. As Walter Rodney memorably put it: ‘Fascism was a monster born of capitalist parents’.
Central to the defining of Black anti-fascism is the unerring focus on white supremacy within all forms of fascism. Arguing that ‘there is no Fascism anywhere that is not also anti-Black’ (p. 8), the authors mobilise the convincing scholarship on how Nazi race laws were indebted to slave codes and Jim Crowism. A distinction is made between the form fascism took in Europe in relation to dictatorial regimes and forms of anti-Black fascism in the US, which function through laws, policing, corporatisation, incarceration, racial codes and extrajudicial killing. Whilst the American eugenicist movement, with its calls for Black female sterilisation and forced vasectomies, had direct links to Nazi concepts of ‘racial hygiene’, the book also makes clear that lynching, like European fascism, displayed an obsession with protecting the race from ‘pollution’ through dehumanisation and murder of gendered racialised others. It later draws on George Jackson’s prison writing, which identifies a ‘fascism-corporativism’ in the systems of criminal justice and class exploitation.
The book uses diverse material from a range of sources, from autobiography and political pamphlets to oral history and social media. It is also threaded through with references to literary texts of the period. Langston Hughes’s poetry is particularly prominent in this regard but important Black writers like Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks and the oft-overlooked Ann Petry are also engaged. This literary-historical dimension works to re-canonise African American literature in relation to the anti-fascist cultural front of the interwar and post-war periods. The book is divided into seven chapters, from Ida Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching crusade, through interwar Black Atlantic anti-fascism, the Double V campaign of the second world war, the post-war ‘We Charge Genocide’ movement, Black Power, contemporary abolitionism and Black Lives Matter. This ambitious and extensive sweep enables a compelling narrative to emerge. Moreover, that narrative traces a continuum of Black resistance to white supremacy that places today’s struggles within a rich tradition of Black anti-fascist and sometimes anti-capitalist politics.
As the Black anti-fascist syllabus at the end of the book signifies, this is as much a handbook for US activists as an historical text. That sense of urgency and motivated writing ensures that the book is both highly readable and appropriately rage making. It also means that it is a little compacted in parts, with the footnotes doing some heavy lifting in relation to important historical events. There is a dizzying array of names and events in this book, pointing to the rich history of activism being narrated but which could perhaps have been explicated with more patience. However, this is a petty enough critique in a text which organises its material to present an impressive and compelling argument that Black anti-fascism runs through the Black radical tradition. Thus, naming Ida Wells-Barnett as a ‘premature’ anti-fascist is not a neat device to homogenise all forms of anti-racist protest; it is a meaningful attempt to place her writings and activism within a hitherto neglected trajectory. Wells-Barnett identified in early twentieth-century lynching a form of homicidal race politics which can be best understood through the prism of fascism. As Langston Hughes expressed it, fascism is the Klan with ‘machine guns and airplanes instead of a few yards of rope’.
Less convincing is the later inclusion of Frank Wilderson’s concept of ‘anti-Blackness’ within the tradition of Black anti-fascism as defined and elucidated in this book. This is not just because the politics of Afro-pessimism are somewhat at odds with the, often transnational, politics of Black agency which are at the centre of this text, but also because the light and selective glossing of his work is unconvincing in this regard. The collapsing of Angela Davis’s recognition of anti-Black racism that structures mass incarceration into the concept of anti-Blackness as ontology would need more careful explication than is presented here. Having made careful and convincing selections in delineating a Black anti-fascist tradition, the book in its latter pages becomes a little more amorphous and, at times, overly long quotations take the place of careful analysis of contemporary racist and fascist currents in the US.
Yet, in the main, the writers and activists presented in this book, from the US and the wider Black Atlantic, were indeed at the forefront of a well-delineated Black anti-fascist tradition. From anti-lynching campaigns, through Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, African American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, the battles against Jim Crow, the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and prison abolitionists, a compelling narrative emerges which centres Black experience and politics in how we might understand what fascism is. Black activists, as racialised subjects with a particular experience of myriad forms of structural and bodily violence, forefront their familiarity with the racial violence that inheres in both the racial state itself and forms of fascist rule under racial capitalism. There is a long tradition of African Americans naming homicidal racism in the US as fascism. This tradition has much to teach us about the nature of fanatical racialisation and the refusal of basic democratic rights along a strictly enforced colour line. It has much to tell us about the horrors of the Prison Industrial Complex and the brutalities of policing Black bodies and Black lives.
Fascism is not just any old thing but it is, in the words of James Peck who volunteered to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, ‘a species of thing’ which Black Atlantic subjects have long experience of. That experience is collated and illustrated here in all its multifaceted, esoteric and insightful intensity. In their rigorous introduction, Hope and Mullen inform the reader that: ‘Black Antifascism organizes itself around imaginative overturnings of racial capitalism’s globalized efforts to make Black life a baseline for the immiseration of human beings everywhere’ (p. 5). In the pages that follow, a story unfolds of disparate but connected struggles against murderous forms of race-making which collapse any neat dividing line between fascism and democracy under racial capitalism.