Our first class starts by examining various definitions of fascism in order to foreground how it has functioned historically as a concept-in-class-struggle, while also emphasizing the importance of a dialectical approach. This will allow us to situate fascism within the deep history of capitalism and its imperialist expansion. We then analyze how the Italian fascists and the Nazis rose to power within the constitutional parameters of bourgeois democracy--by receiving abundant funding from big industrial domestic and international capital--to run populist electoral campaigns and whip up certain sectors of the population around an ultra-nationalist and colonial program. Since every capitalist country had fascist movements in the wake of the Great Depression, we also examine what happened to these movements in the cases when they fully consolidated state power. Finally, we discuss how an internationalist, materialist perspective can help us make sense of the capitalist ruling class’s decisions to favor hegemony or repression in specific instances, and what this concretely means for fascist political practices and their visibility as such.

Course materials:
Daniel Guérin, Fascism and big business
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/guerin/1938/10/fascism.htm
José Carlos Mariátegui, “Biologia del fascismo”
https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/1925/escena/01.htm
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on colonialism, trans. J. Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 35-46.

Class 1: Classical fascism, colonialism, and international political economy

Quito Swan’s forthcoming book Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World (NYU Press, March 2022) beautifully encompasses the type of internationalist solidarity our 39th issue The Ocean… From the Black Atlantic to the Sea of Islands would like to convey. As such, this interview about the struggles of liberation in Melanesia (in particular West Papua, Kanaky, and Vanuatu) constitutes a cornerstone of the issue, for which we are deeply grateful to Quito.

Hailing from the island of Bermuda, Quito Swan is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. An award-winning historian of Black internationalism, he is the author of Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020), Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anticolonialism, and the African World (New York University Press, 2022). Pauulu’s Diaspora was awarded the African American Intellectual History Association’s (AAIHS) 2021 Pauli Murray Book Prize and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) 2021 Fellowship Book Award Prize.

Quito Swan /// Black Internationalism From Bermuda and Africa to the Oceanian Struggles

A final yet stern tone as Mr Finian gestures towards the front of the chamber.  Clicks and ticks proceed their hushed entrance. 

Music Written & Performed by Esslemont
Taken from the EP 'The Court of the Three Sister'
2022

Spinning Tops in the High Ragged Moon

reverse patterns

Houston, I Am Fading

Welcome to Black Agenda Radio, where we provide news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. Coming up: Eritrea’s recent votes in the United Nations demonstrate its continued independence from US dictates, and we discuss the book Manufacturing Hate: How Africa was Demonized in Western Media.

But first, Gus Griffin, a member of Black Alliance for Peace Africa Team and the Membership Committee of the Ujima People’s Progress Party, discusses their upcoming third statewide conference taking place in Landover, Maryland on April 23rd.

Elias Amare is an editor and journalist at Horn of Africa TV. US policy towards Eritrea has always been hostile. Recent events have been no different as the US continues to target that nation with sanctions, along with its neighbor Ethiopia. But Eritrea takes a firmly independent stance, as it has shown with recent UN votes regarding Russia.

Milton Allimadi is publisher of Black Star News, an adjunct professor of history at John Jay College, and an adjunct professor in the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University. He is the author of Manufacturing Hate: How Africa was Demonized in Western Media.

Black Agenda Radio April 15, 2022

"Consider how the idea of a folly might be transposed, so to speak, to music."

On a eurorack modular system, polyphony is sheer folly - costly, ornamental, with little practical purpose.

--

More on this 565th weekly Disquiet Junto project – Musical Folly (The Assignment: Make a piece of music inspired by this architectural concept) – at: https://disquiet.com/0565/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0565-musical-folly/

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “architectural folly on British estate in disrepair, photograph.”

disquiet0565 - four voice folly

Weird Garden

Recording of the recital by Samuel Vriezen (Erard piano) at the Amsterdam Wandelweiserfestival 2022, Orgelpark, Amsterdam.

Five pieces, played attacca:

0'00":
Chop. (Samuel Vriezen, 2019)

ca. 5'30":
2. Stück 2004-1 (Manfred Werder, 2004)

ca. 13'55":
3. Ballade nr. 4 in f minor (Frédéric Chopin, 1842)

ca. 25'50"
4. Stück 2004-2 (Manfred Werder, 2004)

32'22":
5. Frédéric Chopin (Samuel Vriezen, 2019. First performance)

Recital 30 Oktober 11.00

Ellingtonia

Flamingo (Piano/Solovox, 1950s)

my little offering for Drone Day May 27, 2023

Drone Day Drone

The Funambulist Podcast operates in parallel of The Funambulist, a magazine that engages with the politics of space and bodies.

Quito Swan /// Black Internationalism From Bermuda and Africa to the Oceanian Struggles

The Funambulist Podcast

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