The White West IV: Whose Universal?

In his famous essay Discourse on Colonialism, poet Aimé Césaire argued that what Europe calls “fascism” is just colonial violence finding its way back home. Yet, his warnings went unheeded, leaving the postwar consensus to settle on the notion that fascism was a distortion or negation of modernity, not one of its constitutive features. Also obscured was the role universalism plays in the construction of the subject it claims to represent, and by extension, the construction of the subject it excludes.

Whose Universal? contends that without the will to confront the structuring role of colonial schemas in Western epistemology, appeals to universal values and principles – like “all lives matter” – contribute to the emergence of an equivocal space in which a critique or disruption of capitalism can be inflected in the direction of fascism.

Whose Universal? is part of a series of conferences devoted to theorizing the poorly understood connection between settler colonialism and fascism, as well as the different facets of what social theorist Nikhil Pal Singh termed “the afterlife of fascism,” and the structures of affect they engender. Past issues of the series took place under the title The White West at La Colonie, Paris (part I and part II), at Kunsthalle Wien (part III) and at HKW (part IV).

Organisiert von Kader Attia, Anselm Franke und Ana Teixeira Pinto

Part of The New Alphabet

• #Capitalism
• #Colonialism
• #Conference
• #Fascism
• #Modernism