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.
