Not Now: Modernism, Nativism and Fascism in American Art and Culture

Generously funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, this international symposium seeks to reframe conventional accounts of the emergence of fascism and anti-fascism in the United States. Foremost, it brings together scholars whose work on American modernism and its links to forms of nativism opens a space for challenging standard accounts of fascism’s interwar origins and the larger assumption that American fascism is a European import. Insisting that a longer history of American fascism necessary, the symposium seeks to ask: Does attending to the resurgence of fascism now require a rethinking of fascism’s origin in the racial regimes and historical traumas of a settler colony and the visual culture that buttressed it? How can art historians situate neo-fascism now within fascism’s origins then?

Location: Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre
Date: June 14 (6-8pm) and June 15 (10am-7pm), 2024