IAS Workshop: Global Fascisms

ABOUT THE EVENT
This one-day workshop organised by the UCL Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the School of Advanced Study (University of London) will bring together a range of voices in terms of regional focus (Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe), institutional location, and career stage to present new work that reconsiders the complex legacies of fascism, the Second World War and genocide in global context.

The workshop is part of a wider move to de-provincialise and historicise the current rise of far-right and fascist politics. Despite transnational trends in fascism studies and related fields, the public and academic understanding of fascism and its legacies is still Eurocentric. Much work on the ‘alt-right’ is also ahistorical. We will look at the ways in which a paradoxically transnational ideology played out in regions that are often overlooked in the study of fascism. We will also consider the resources available from the study of historical anti-fascist movements for teachers, activists and researchers dealing with far-right political mobilization in the current day.

For questions about the workshop, please contact the organisers, Pragya Dhital (School of Advanced Studies, University of London): pragya.dhital@sas.ac.uk and Zoltán Kékesi (Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, UCL): z.kekesi@ucl.ac.uk.

Funded by the UCL Octagon Fund and UCL Centre for Transnational and Global History and supported by Jagjeet Lally, UCL History and the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies.

SCHEDULE

9:30-10:00am: Welcome and Introduction

10:00-11:30am: Panel 1 – The Infra-politics of Fascism and Anti-fascism
(Chair: Jagjeet Lally, UCL History)

Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert (University College London): Anti-fascist organising as building new infrastructures of life – reflections on fieldwork in contemporary England

Khawla Zainab (University of Oxford): Contemporary fascism and capitalism in the Global South: an ethnographic study of Muslim gig-workers in India

Pragya Dhital (SAS, University of London): The Shaheen Bagh protests in New Delhi, 2019-20: anti-fascism at the interface of formal and unofficial politics

11:30am-12:00pm: Break

12:00-1:30pm: Panel 2 – Anti-fascist and Anti-racist Lineages
(Chair: Zoltán Kékesi, UCL Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies)

Sara Camacho Felix (King’s College London) and Ariane Smart (University College London): Centering African Anarchist voices: Câmara Pires, Memory, and the Enduring Struggle for Liberation from Colonial-Fascism (1947–1964)

Anna Koch (University College London): Still Fighting Fascism: German Jewish Communists’ Understanding of Racism and Antisemitism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

Samuel Houlberg (University College London): Fascism, memory and queer politics: The politics of 'neo-fascism' at the International Lesbian and Gay Association in the late twentieth century

1:30-2:30pm: Lunch
with a presentation and table display of relevant material in the Wiener Holocaust Library

2:30-3.30pm: Panel 3 – Global Legacies: Africa, Asia and Southeast Europe
(Chair: Katherine Baxter, University of Northumbria)

Amber Murrey (University of Oxford): Reflections on Geographies of Fascism and Authoritarianism in Global Africa

Touhidul Islam and Bayes Ahmed (University College London): Contemporaneous Denial and the Role of Bystanders in Genocide Prevention and Intervention

3:30-4:00pm: Break

4:00-5:00pm: Panel 4 - Global Legacies: Southern and Western Europe and the Americas
(Chair: Pragya Dhital)

Nicoletta Arena (University of Florence): The Axis After 1945. Transnational Survival and Reorganization of Fascism in Italy, West Germany and Austria (1945–1955)

Zoltán Kékesi (University College London): Third Reich Peripheries: Nazism in Argentina’s Borderlands

5:00 - 7:00pm: Drinks

Image: National Front sticker (1978) and cover of Race Today (September/October 1978) from the Wiener Holocaust Library online exhibition: Beware this Poison