In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Alyosha Goldstein and Simón Ventura Trujillo. Goldstein is Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Trujillo is Assistant Professor in the English Department at New York University. Their co-edited book is, For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Simón Ventura Trujillo: I think our approach to fascism can help readers understand the current political and ecological crisis in a longer history of colonial and imperial authoritarian crisis. I think this longer historical view can reinvigorate organic modes of study and research into prior anti-imperial and anticolonial struggles across the planet. In our introduction, we specifically point to US ethnic studies as one especially rich example of anti-imperialist knowledge production. Excavating such models is important not only for a deeper historical understanding of fascism’s role in the contemporary moment. These models of anti-imperialist study are also important as a way of cultivating durable forms of optimism and hope, in addition to a sense of open-endedness in contemporary struggles.
Alyosha Goldstein: Too often the label “fascist” is used to define particular groups or leaders as exceptional, as breaking with the generally acceptable spectrum of politics. The argument of For Antifascist Futures is that fascism and other authoritarianisms have been consistent features of liberal democracies, operative in regimes of racist terror, colonial occupation, and militarization, or seemingly externalized through imperial circuits of extraction, labor exploitation, warfare, and displacement. Fascism and other authoritarianisms need to be understood as a response to crises of colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism that must be addressed in historical and global context. The book shows why it’s necessary to have an analysis informed by mobilizing and building power in coalition to confront the expansive and violently uneven consequences of global racial capitalist crisis. Imperial crisis is linked to crises of the expanded reproduction of capitalist accumulation. For Antifascist Futures also shows how and why antifascism must be grounded in anti-imperialism, anticolonialism, anticapitalism, and antiracist movements fighting against anti-Blackness, Indigenous dispossession, misogyny, the multifaceted assault on trans*, queer, and gender-nonconforming people, and the capitalist ecological catastrophe. Organizing against fascism, or other various forms of authoritarianism, as a manifestation of imperial crisis illuminates the broad base for collective worldmaking.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
AG: For Antifascist Futures highlights how and why Black, Indigenous, and other people of color have historically been and continue to be at the forefront of theorizing and dismantling fascism, white supremacy, and other modes of authoritarian rule. We underscore what many activists and community organizers know, which is the necessity for intersectional movement building. The book focuses on the interdependency of collective liberation and the importance of addressing connections across local, regional, and global conditions no matter what the particular site of struggle. Especially in terms of what gets called fascism, this means we think it’s crucial keep in mind and in relation, for instance, the following: How, in 1936, Langston Hughes insisted that “fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America”; the fact that the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in Europe is not a unique horror but in fact exists alongside multiple genocidal atrocities such as colonial campaigns to eliminate Indigenous peoples and other moments of racial, ethnic, and heteropatriarchal “cleansing”; and, in their chapter in the book, Anne Spice’s observation that “I deliberately refuse to differentiate between the ‘colonial’ and ‘fascist’ forces we oppose, because I think that anti-fascist organizing often ignores the (centuries) of experience that Indigenous peoples have in standing up to the imposition of state violence, surveillance, military occupation, and extra-legal violence.” For Antifascist Futures is intended as a resource for placing these many histories of struggle in conversation and connection.
SVT: On one level, I hope that readers will come away with a new sense of urgency for collective action against state violence, as well as a deeper historical view of the ways fascism is connected to legacies of imperial invasion and colonial occupation. On another level, I hope that the book also renews a sense of possibility and optimism for activist and community organizing work. If we only gauge our work through court decisions and stalemated legislative acts, then the present moment indeed appears dire. But if we study how a range of anticolonial and anti-imperial work has always negotiated the colonial violence of liberal governance, then the present moment becomes reframed as an active site of possibility for multiple forms of collectivity and sociality.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
SVT: This is a great question. I hope that readers will unlearn the fantasy that liberal governance works for the people, and the correlating fantasy that capitalism is natural and can be adequately tweaked to address the mass destitution and ecological catastrophe that we are seeing growing on the daily. I see a reframing of fascism as especially relevant to this work. Our reframing of fascism sheds light on liberalism and capitalism as perpetually entangled in the brutal imperial pillaging of people and places. This means that we are encouraging readers to unlearn the view that the US is a land of benevolent freedom. Such unlearning can hopefully illuminate the range of quotidian fascisms—antiblackness, Indigenous elimination, and migrant punishment, to name a few—that historically and currently animate the structure and practice of US democracy.
AG: I’d just echo what Simón just said. We hope to contribute to unlearning and dismantling the common sense of liberalism, racial capitalism, and white supremacy. I wrote an essay and edited a journal issue with Manu Karuka and Juliana Hu Pegues on what we called “colonial unknowing,” which is the active investment in and reproduction of colonial ignorance and white entitlement as a means of sustaining imperial prerogative and power at the expense of everyone else and the more-than-human world. Your emphasis on “unlearning” rather than simply learning is a great way of already calling attention to the deliberate ways that such ignorance or acts and conditions of ignoring are produced and not simply something that can be resolved if everyone just knew the “truth.” This is one of the main points of Nadia Abu El-Haj’s chapter on “The Banality of Knowledge,” which is the first chapter in the book.
Which intellectuals and/or intellectual movements most inspire your work?
SVT: Angela Davis’s work on abolition has been deeply transformational to my outlook on the stakes of intellectual work. Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez’s life and work remains a model for a feminist internationalist socialist practice that is committed to solidarity work. Leslie Marmon Silko’s writings make clear the ways Indigenous people remain vital to and inventive of a wide range of anticapitalist struggles. Thich Nhat Hanh’s practice of engaged Buddhism has taught me the importance of cultivating happiness and compassion in what may appear as the darkest of times.
AG: Similar to Simón, I’m more interested in movement intellectuals than intellectual movements. Ideas and theorization emerge from everyday struggle, so I really see everyone who tries to understand how to collectively engage and transform the world as an “intellectual.” Movements that seek to work in coalition towards some form of internationalist vision seem especially crucial to me. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s emphasis on internationalism and conception of an abolitionist internationalism is a powerful example of this understanding of connection and interdependency. The work of the Red Nation to establish multiple links toward a global anticapitalist Indigenous movement is another important example. What’s indispensable about both approaches to internationalism is that they both prioritize the particularity of place-based struggles and the here and now of everyday movement building, while also situating these in a worldwide context and project for collective liberation. Emerging efforts for Black and Native movements to work together and to grapple with connections and differences between the forms of dispossession, exploitation, and violence are key in this regard. Such vital conversations are evident in recent books such as Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Rehearsals for Living (Haymarket, 2022).
Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these titles in your future work?
SVT: Kelly Lytle Hernández’s City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) is a powerful and accessible account of the relationship between mass incarceration and settler colonial occupation in the US writ large, but in Los Angeles in particular. In some of my current thinking, I’m trying to connect histories of Indigenous captivity and elimination to the rise of agricultural modernity and ecological catastrophe in New Mexico. Hernández’s work provides a very useful model for excavating the residues of prior colonial formations in the structures of US modernity.
The second book would be Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Urgent Indigenous wisdom from time immemorial fills the pages of this book. A lyrical, powerful, and unsettling meditation on the methodological and political power embedded in Indigenous people refusing dispossession and the traps of colonial statist recognition.
AG: Joanne Barker’s Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist, published in 2021 by the University of California Press, is a book that I think everyone should read. Barker’s really brilliant analysis is essential for understanding the criminalization, counterinsurgency, and dispossession targeting Indigenous peoples. Red Scare is also deeply attuned to how Indigenous peoples’ movements against colonial occupation, extractive capitalism, and sexual violence are significant to political and social struggle for liberation more broadly.
It’s difficult to limit myself to two books, so I want to recommend two additional books that are in certain respects related, or that at least connect in potentially generative ways, as well as being directly relevant in relation to For Antifascist Futures: Quito Swan’s Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World (NYU Press, 2022) and Moon-Ho Jung’s Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State (University of California Press, 2022). Both of these compelling books center anticolonialism as a radical multifaceted worldmaking project with indispensable lessons for the challenges of our current moment. This global perspective on the difficult but necessary work of anticolonial solidarities is central to my work and future projects as well.
Roberto Sirvent is editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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