Authoritarianism and the planetary mission of queer of color critique: a short reflection

ABSTRACT

This contribution to a journal special issue on comparative populisms investigates the necessity and possibility of queer of color critique’s engaging authoritarian formations in the contemporary moment. Initiated as an examination of neoliberal formations, queer of color critique must – the paper argues – train its interests on and develop its theorizations around the emergence of fascist formations around the globe. To do so, it turns to the anti-fascist work of the Frankfurt School as well as the lesser known anti-fascist writings and insights coming from the black radical tradition, scholarship within North American indigenous studies, and anti-racist feminist cultural production.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer of color critique
• Frankfurt School
• authoritarianism
• fascism
• neoliberalism
• culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ For a detailed analysis, see Mukherjee, “Regulating Race in the California Civil Rights Initiative,” 27–47.

² Connolly, “Neoliberalism and Fascism.”

³ Adorno, “Freudian Theory,” 118.

⁴ Ibid., 119.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 41.

⁷ Neumann, Behemoth, 123.

⁸ Adorno, “Freudian Theory,” 131.

⁹ James, “Popular Art,” 247.

¹⁰ Morrison, “Racism and Fascism,” 15.

¹¹ Ibid., 15–16.

¹² Williams, Marxism and Literature, 121.

¹³ Bacchetta, El-Tayeb, and Haritaworn, “Queer of Color Formations,” 770.

¹⁴ Ibid., 773.

¹⁵ Chaudhary and Chappe, “The Supermanagerial Reich.”

¹⁶ Lenin, Imperialism, 12.

¹⁷ Ibid., 4.

¹⁸ Barker, “Territory as Analytic,” 29.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Byrd et al., “Predatory Value,” 2.

²¹ See de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 366, and Carlyle, “The N***** Question,” 377.

²² Park, Race and Culture, 280.

²³ Bambara, “Language and the Writer,” 139.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roderick A. Ferguson

Roderick A. Ferguson is professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. He received his B.A. from Howard University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. An interdisciplinary scholar, his work traverses such fields as American Studies, gender studies, queer studies, cultural studies, African American Studies, sociology, literature, and education. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California Press, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).