Anti-Fascist Words in New Orleans
It is Carnival Time in New Orleans, the
pre-Lenten season of misrule. This city,
famous for many things, it not famous for having a robust tradition of
left-wing thinking. That is neither good
nor bad; it is just a symptom of ideological minimalism.
Under the influence of carnival, the sincere effort of
the Antenna/Press Street art space to organize an Anti-Fascist Reading Group is
tainted by theatricality through no fault of its own. The gravity of a peculiar Zeitgeist governs
the turning of its moral compass. It
should not be dismissed as trivial that the address of Antenna is 3718 St.
Claude Avenue, because it is located in a site of rampant gentrification. Nor should it be overlooked that the
organizing meeting occurred on the evening of January 19, 2017, the eve of the
live birth of the Age of Trump. The
meeting belongs to a family of reactive national gatherings, all of them
associated with fear of American fascism.
From the vantage of conservative or right-wing thinking, the Antenna effort is a reactionary instance of sour
grapes. From the vantage of what Hoke Glover calls free black thought, it is at
once retarded and Caucasian, insufficiently indigenous or vernacular. It articulated in a new key what a number of
African American thinkers, who are intimate with struggles, had been saying under the radar for many, many
years. America was fascist before Donald Trump was born. Add the probability that the "powers
that be" in New Orleans have been
abetting vernacular fascism since 2005 and then try to deconstruct a nest of
contradictions.
My participation in the meeting and my response to it was
ambivalent. I was dismayed that fellow
participants (mainly white) evidenced little sense of what the pedagogy of the
oppressed is. I sensed that they were fearful
and outraged; that they possessed a
sense of dread but lacked a sense of oppression quite as much as they lacked
respect for local knowledge, the epistemology of indigenous peoples in the
Americas. Even if I was misreading strangers
---I had previous conversations with only one participant---I was not
misreading their inability to acknowledge themselves as the Other. Carnival is
a vacuum for good, well-meant intentions.
But I was heartened that they wanted to do the right thing. They are
simply afflicted by what the Critical Ethnic Studies Association might describe
as "the limitations of liberal multicultural institutionalization within
the academy, which often relies on a politics of identity representation that
is dilated and domesticated by nation-building and capitalist
imperatives." By virtue of Latinate
rhetoric, the CESA statement secures a place in a nest of contradictions. And my ambivalence does not exist outside the
nest.
To return to the main point. The Antenna/Press Street organizers suggested
the reading group should have bi-monthly meetings to discuss themes derived
from fiction, nonfiction, and film.
Knowing by count of hands that
the majority of the participants had read Umberto Eco's 1995 essay
"Ur-Fascism," I recommended that we use his list of fourteen features
of ur-fascism to generate themes and select readings for future meetings ---
1. cult of
tradition
2. rejection of
modernism
3. action for
action's sake
4. treason of
disagreement
5. fear of
difference
6. appeal to a
frustrated middle class
7. obsession with
a plot
8. people feeling
"humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies"
9. pacifism is
trafficking with the enemy/ life is permanent warfare
10. contempt for
the weak/ popular elitism
11. everybody is
educated to become a hero
12. machismo
13. selective
populism
14. Newspeak [ n.b., tweets constitute new speech]
The main themes that popped up were ecology, agriculture,
regionalism, surveillance, and digital security. I added in my second brief comment that
terrorism and American evasion of cultural memory regarding indigenous peoples
were crucial themes. I wasn't familiar
with most of the titles that popped up
----Society Against the State: Essays in
Political Anthropology by Pierre Clastres, Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, The Fight to Vote by Michael Waldman, The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson, The Next Revolution:
Sustainable Activism for the
Twenty-First Century by Grace Lee Boggs and Scott Kurashige, but I did
recognize White Noise by Don DeLillo,
The Trial by Frantz Kafka, 1984 by George Orwell. I left the meeting before a theme and the
reading (s) for the next meeting were set, left wondering why no titles by
right-wing or neo-fascist intellectuals
(other than those referenced by "Ur-Fascism" ) popped up. I think it is obligatory for people who
embrace anti-fascist postures to do what many African Americans have been doing
for centuries: read the propaganda of the
enemies as well as the hymns addressed to the choir. I shall attend the next meeting of this
reading group to discover answers.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. January 20, 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment