Various: The White West

Sternberg Press, 2024, softcover, 248 pages, 14.5 x 21 cm

Tracing the relation between fascism and settler colonialism.

In the aftermath of World War II, the recently liberated nations in Europe were swift to resume colonial oppression abroad. On May 8, 1945, the day victory was celebrated by the Allies, the French police massacred hundreds of townspeople in Sétif, leading the French editor Claude Bourdet to ask, "Are we the Gestapo in Algeria?"

In Europe, what is called "fascism," poet Aimé Césaire argued in his famous essay "Discourse on Colonialism," is just colonial violence finding its way back home. In White West, contributors challenge the Eurocentrism that undergirds the current concept of fascism, tackling the under-theorized relation between settler colonialism and National Socialism via the "proto-totalitarian" scene of colonial expansion and its racialized concept of personhood, in order to counter the antipolitical nature of a concept such as the West, and the resurgence of fascist doctrines this notion engenders.