On Fronts and Fissures: Labour Internationalism in the Struggles against Colonial Racial Fascism

A public lecture by Alberto Toscano, with Darren Byler and Anushay Malik

Sponsored by the SFU Labour Studies Program, the School for International Studies, and the Global Asia Program

December 4, 2024 | 5:30PM - 7PM | Hybrid

Harbour Centre Room 2270 & via Zoom

Abstract:
Recent critical histories of anti-fascism have foregrounded the singular if often marginalised contribution of what Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen term the “Black antifascist tradition,” and Minkah Makalani has explored under the aegis of “radical Black internationalism.” International campaigns against Fascist Italy’s brutal invasion of Ethiopia brought together anti-colonial and pan-African activists, communist trade unionists and socialist feminists (and, of course, people and groups whose political identities and practices cut across these categories). In this talk, Alberto Toscano wants to reflect on how histories of anti-colonial and anti-racist labour internationalism, both in the interwar period and after, have shaped our understanding of fascism as a global phenomenon that both precedes and exceeds its Italian and German instantiations. In a present wracked by crises that demonstrate that neither colonialism nor fascism are things of the past, what can we make of this militant archive?

About the speaker:
Alberto Toscano teaches at the School of Communication, SFU, and is the author, most recently, of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis and Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum. He is also the co-editor of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation and The SAGE Handbook of Marxism.

About the panelists:
Darren Byler is an Assistant Professor in the School for International Studies at SFU. He is the award-winning author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City and In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony.

Anushay Malik is a historian who works on labour and migration in South Asia and British Columbia. She is currently teaching at SFU in International Studies and Global Asia.