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Jonathan Scott.
Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes.
2006
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American Fascism
A Special Issue of Socialism and Democracy
Call
for Papers
Many critics of the Bush administration use the term
fascist in describing the regime’s policies and the
agenda of its rightwing Christian social base. While
fascist is useful as a general description of the
ideology of the American Right, there are significant
differences between the American kind and the European.
This special issue of Socialism and Democracy asks the
question: Where did American fascism come from? If not
Europe, what American cultural traditions and social
formations have prepared the way for fascist rule in
U.S. society? What is the hallmark of American fascism?
Can it be said that American fascism is older than
European fascism? We are open to any critique of fascism
in the U.S., but are especially interested in articles
on the following subjects:
The interwar Hegelian Marxist theory of
fascism
A brief history of European fascism
Affinities between U.S. white supremacism
and European fascism
The African American tradition’s early
critique of fascism
The Anatomy of Babbitt, American little man
The Antifeminism of the Evangelicals: the
fascist rhetoric of Christian fundamentalism
The rise of the Right in the age of
capitalist decline
American sports and the fascist personality
American Gangster: the fascist as a social
type
The Civil Rights Movement and the ”white
backlash”
The Clinton agenda: fascism in liberal drag?
New Ghosts: from Communism to Islam
Resisting American fascism |
Articles can be
anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 words. Send your
manuscript as an email attachment, in Word doc format,
to Jonathan Scott at
jonascott15@aol.com
. Deadline for submissions is Jan. 15, 2008.
The American
Fascist and Nazi parties were quite active and
organized, and held huge rallies in large USA cities in
the 1930s. An adult student in one of my classes at St.
Peter's College noted that her father, an Italian emigre,
was a member of the Fascist Party of America in the
1930s. I would like to see some papers about expatriate
Italian Fascisti.
Also, the FBI
arrested German Americans who belonged to the American
Nazi Party in the 1940s. That would be another fertile
area of studious exploration. The FBI agents tailed
German Americans during WW 1 and 2 whether they were
Nazis or not, my German friends in Wisconsin told me in
the 1970s. German American professors took out full page
ads in the NY Times to protest their patriotism against
the widespread prejudice against all Germans.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank B. Wilderson, III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student, Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America.
Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update
29 December 2011
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