Ever since neofascist movements
began to surge across the globe, liberal commentators have tried to put a name to what they are defending from these illiberal
ideologies. The consensus is reason or rationality––after the Second World War, mainstream scholarship has supported the view
that adherence to fascism is a thing of unreason. This distinction between reason and unreason, a tenet of Enlightenment thought,
sustains the universal appeal of liberal democracy but leaves unexamined the paradoxes that haunt modernity, particularly
its colonial foundation, thus obscuring the continuities between fascism and imperial policies.
The White West:
Fascism, Unreason, and the Paradox of Modernity contends that, without confronting the structuring force of race in the
production and reproduction of global wealth disparities, fighting for reason only leads to flawed utopias in which a critique
or disruption of capitalism is easily inflected in the direction of neofascism. This collection of writing by leading historians,
theorists, and scholars engages the overlaps between philosophical predicates and colonial legacies, as well as the undertheorized
continuities between fascism and settler colonialism.
With contributions by Larne Abse Gogarty, Norman Ajari, Ramon
Amaro, Sladja Blazan, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Donna V. Jones, Nitzan Lebovic, Olivier Marboeuf, A. Dirk Moses, Rijin Sahakian,
Nikhil Pal Singh, Kerstin Stakemeier, and Felix Stalder.
The book presentation of
The White West: Fascism,
Unreason, and the Paradox of Modernity, edited by Kader Attia, Anselm Franke, and Ana Teixeira Pinto, will take place
on June 11 at 6:00 p.m. at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Further information can be found
here.
