Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics by Alessandrini Anthony C.;

Author:Alessandrini, Anthony C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1729308
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

There are, it should be noted, potential risks in a contemporary strategy that would attempt to reappropriate the legacy of the struggle against anti-fascism in the same direct way as Césaire does here. After all, similar sorts of direct parallels to Hitler have been used repeatedly over the past few decades by right-wing forces in the United States, whether for the purpose of seeking legitimation for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq (through the “Saddam = Hitler” equation, for example) or to stir up opposition to health care reform (through the recent fashion for portraying President Barack Obama as Hitler). In this context, it is worth recalling Gilroy’s youthful semiotic confusion when faced with ultranationalist fascist groups in Britain, “the teddy boys who terrified me as a child and their successors, the skinheads who hounded me through my teenage years”; he recalls asking his father: “Weren’t fascists the same as Nazis? . . . How could they be English people? How could English people be Fascists? Was their exciting lightning-flash the same sort of thing as the hated but fascinating swastika?”33

We would do well to bring some of this spirit of child’s-eye inquiry to the horrifying phenomena of digitally altered photographs that merge the faces of Obama and Hitler, or the sight of Obama’s smiling face photoshopped over a figure in full Nazi regalia, images that have proliferated alarmingly since 2008. In spite of these frightening precedents, Gilroy’s strategy in Against Race works to keep alive Césaire’s outraged call to make the continuing presence of fascism part of our history of the present (and future). We might do the same sort of work when faced with the contemporary link between fascism and Islamophobia in Europe and North America, as well as the presence of white supremacist and other fascist groups as part of the rising tide of anti-immigrant rhetoric (and violence) in the United States.34 The full complexity with which these issues need to be addressed, to give just one possible example, has been highlighted in the political attacks on ethnic studies programs in Arizona, a state that is home to some of the most draconian anti-immigrant laws in the United States. For example, in 2011, Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, John Huppenthal, compared the Tucson Unified School District's Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies Program to the Hitler Nazi Jugend paramilitary organization, while at the same time endorsing Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, who has openly associated with neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations.35

Given this politically motivated reengagement with the fascist past, it is striking that Gilroy ends Against Race by taking a step back from the past—or, to put it more accurately, as he does in the book’s final sentence, a step towards “bring[ing] even more powerful visions of planetary humanity from the future into the present and reconnect[ing] them with democratic and cosmopolitan traditions that have been all but expunged from today’s black political imaginary.”36 Of course, there is no real abandonment of the past here, but rather a

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