With a renewed focus on fascist discourse and iconography taking place across the world, a call for papers on the international dimensions of fascism has been issued for a workshop taking place in Mexico in June 2017.
The workshop, ‘Fascism and the International: The Global Order Yesterday and Tomorrow,’ will be hosted from 18 to 20 June at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. It is being organised by Kent Law School Lecturer Dr Rose Sydney Parfitt, who is currently based at Melbourne Law School undertaking a three-year research project with funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC).
Although the workshop leans towards the field of international law, Dr Parfitt says its character is strongly interdisciplinary and interventions (including textual, visual and aural interventions) from individuals and groups working in all disciplines are welcome.
Possible topics include (but are by no means limited to):
- The international dimensions of neo-fascist groups like Golden Dawn and the ‘Alt-Right’, together with their historical connections to (and disconnections from) inter-war fascist movements
- The innovations made by fascist international lawyers and theorists of the international in the 1920s and 1930s in Italy, Japan, France, Germany, Argentina and elsewhere
- The relationship between decolonisation, fascism and anti-colonial theory in Indonesia, Martinique, Ethiopia and elsewhere in the Third World
- The political economy of fascism
- The influence of fascist ideas and practices on post-War dictatorships, both in the Third World and in the West
- The fascist and anti-fascist history of everyday concepts such as environmentalism, motherhood, freedom, space and accumulation
- The relationship between fascism/anti-fascism and Futurism, Dada, Surrealism and other art movements both during the inter-war period and today.
Paper proposals for the workshop are invited from scholars, artists and activists working in and across the fields of international law, history, history of art, international relations, postcolonial studies, sociology, anthropology, political theory, geography, feminist studies, queer theory and critical race theory. Abstracts must be submitted to rose.parfitt@unimelb.edu.au no later than Wednesday 1 March 2017. As spaces are very limited, anyone hoping for their application to be considered is encouraged to contact Dr Parfitt as soon as possible before this deadline.
The workshop, part of a wider project, entitled ‘International Law and the Legacies of Fascist Internationalism’, is funded by ARC, Melbourne Law School and the University of Melbourne. Amongst the activities, there will be an introduction to (and a tour of) the Museo de Arte Moderno, a landmark in modernist architecture and home to one of the most important collections of anti-fascist art in Latin America.
More information is available on the workshop’s Facebook page
Download a copy of the call for papers document (in PDF format)
Image credit: José Chávez Morado (1909-2002), El Fascismo en Latino-América (1939), fragment from a lithograph commissioned from the radical print collective, the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop), by the Liga Pro-Cultura Alemana (League for German Culture), a group of anti- fascist European political exiles based in Mexico City during the 1930s.