Bill V. Mullen

Jeanelle K. Hope

Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition

Black Antifascist Tradition

Christopher Vials

How anti-fascism is as American as apple pie Since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, well before the global renaissance of “white nationalism,” the United States has been home to its own distinct fascist movements, some of which decisively influenced the course of US history. Yet long before “antifa” became a household word in the United States, they were met, time and again, by an equally deep antifascist current. Many on the left are unaware that the United States has a rich antifascist tradition, because it has rarely been discussed as such, nor has it been accessible in one place. This reader reconstructs the history of US antifascism into the twenty-first century, showing how generations of writers, organizers, and fighters spoke to each other over time. Spanning the 1930s to the present, this chronologically-arranged, primary source reader is made up of antifascist writings by Americans and by exiles in the US, some instantly recognizable, others long-forgotten. It also includes a sampling of influential writings from the US fascist, white nationalist, and proto-fascist traditions. Its contents, mostly written by people embedded in antifascist movements, include a number of pieces produced abroad that deeply influenced the US left. The collection thus places US antifascism in a global context.

The US Antifascism Reader

Fred Ho

A collection of writing on the historical alliances, cultural connections, and shared political strategies linking African Americans and Asian Americans.

Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans

Afro Asia

Ashley Dawson

Focusing on the complicity of Israeli universities in maintaining the occupation of Palestine, and on the repression of academic and political freedom for Palestinians, Against Apartheid powerfully explains why scholars and students throughout the world should refuse to do business with Israeli institutions. This rich collection of essays is a handbook for scholars and activists

The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities

Against Apartheid

The biography of one of the world's most earth-shattering African-American writers

Living in Fire

James Baldwin

A revealing exploration of domestic fascism in the United States from the 1930s to the January 6th insurrection in Washington, D.C. In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress presented to the United Nations We Charge Genocide, a more than two-hundred-page petition that held the United States accountable for genocide against African Americans. This landmark text represented the dawn of Black Lives Matter and is as relevant today as it was then, as evidenced by the rise of white supremacist groups across the nation and the January 6th Capitol riot which disclosed the specter of a fascist revival in the US Tracing this specter to its roots, We Charge Genocide! provides an original interpretation of American fascism as a permanent and longstanding current in US politics dating to the origins of US settler-colonialism. Picking up where Angela Davis’s 1971 essay, “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” left off, We Charge Genocide! reveals how the United States legal system has contributed to the growth of fascist states and fascist movements domestically and internationally. American Studies scholar Bill V. Mullen contends that the preservation of a white supremacist world order—and the prevention of revolutionary threats to that order—structure the discourse and practice of US fascism. He names this fascist modality the “counterrevolution of law” in tribute to the radicals on the American Left, such as George Jackson, Angela Davis, Herbert Marcuse, and the Black Panther Party, who perceived the American state’s destruction of revolutionary groups and ideas as a distinctive form of American fascism. Mullen argues that US law, particularly US “race law,” has been an enabling mechanism for modalities of fascist rule that have locked historic blocs of non-white populations into an iron cage of legal and extralegal violence. To this end We Charge Genocide! offers a legal historiography of US fascism rooted in law’s capacity to legitimate and sustain racial domination. By recovering the legacy of important organizations, such as the Civil Rights Congress and Black Panther Party, which have both theorized and resisted American legal fascism, Mullen demonstrates how their work and critical theorists like Davis, Marcuse, Jackson, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Fraenkel illuminate the threat of American legal fascism to its most vulnerable racialized victims of state violence in our time, including gender and transgender violence.

American Fascism and the Rule of Law

We Charge Genocide!

James Edward Smethurst

This collection of fifteen new essays explores the impact of the organized Left and Leftist theory on American literature and culture from the 1920s to the present. In particular, the contributors explore the participation of writers and intellectuals on

Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States

Left of the Color Line

The first biography of the great American writer in over a decade.

Cathryn Watson

After Japan's defeat of Russia in the 1904 territorial war, W. E. B. Du Bois declared, “The Color Line in civilization has been crossed in modern times as it was in the great past. The awakening of the yellow races is certain. That the awakening of the brown and black races will follow in time, no unprejudiced student of history can doubt.” Du Bois's lifelong certitude that Asia would play a central role in determining the fates of races, nations, and world systems of power has not until now been made fully available. W. E. B. Du Bois on Asia captures in unprecedented detail Du Bois's first-person experiences of and responses to Indian nationalism, the war between China and Japan, the life of Mahatma Gandhi, colonialism in Malaysia and Burma, and the promise of China's Communist Revolution. It also provides critical understanding of Du Bois's obsession with the eternal relationship between Asia and Africa dating from antiquity to the postcolonial era. The Du Bois of this collection emerges as a forerunner of post colonialist thought, a lifelong internationalist, and the most important African American reader of Asia's place in the making of the modern world.

Crossing the World Color Line

W. E. B. Du Bois on Asia

Revolutionary Across the Color Line

W. E. B. Du Bois

James Smethurst

This collection of fifteen new essays explores the impact of the organized Left and Leftist theory on American literature and culture from the 1920s to the present. In particular, the contributors explore the participation of writers and intellectuals on the Left in the development of African American, Chicano/Chicana, and Asian American literature and culture. By placing the Left at the center of their examination, the authors reposition the interpretive framework of American cultural studies. Tracing the development of the Left over the course of the last century, the essays connect the Old Left of the pre-World War II era to the New Left and Third World nationalist Left of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to the multicultural Left that has emerged since the 1970s. Individual essays explore the Left in relation to the work of such key figures as Ralph Ellison, T. S. Eliot, Chester Himes, Harry Belafonte, Americo Paredes, and Alice Childress. The collection also reconsiders the role of the Left in such critical cultural and historical moments as the Harlem Renaissance, the Cold War, and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The contributors are Anthony Dawahare, Barbara Foley, Marcial Gonzalez, Fred Ho, William J. Maxwell, Bill V. Mullen, Cary Nelson, B. V. Olguin, Rachel Rubin, Eric Schocket, James Smethurst, Michelle Stephens, Alan Wald, and Mary Helen Washington.

Bill V. Mullen

Books

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