In the calendar year since the election of President Donald J. Trump, there has been a marked intensification of activist demonstrations that have permeated mainstream American culture. Roughly one century after its inception, a group of powerful, semi-underground activists and organizers have resurrected a radical social movement called the Antifa network. Antifa, which is short for anti-fascist, originated in early 20th century Germany, Italy and Spain. The group has now been reborn in response to what Antifa members have identified as a strong and dangerous wave of fascist mentality in American politics. They will not rest until they have succeeded in suppressing and defeating every inkling of fascist sentiment from the American political landscape, regardless of what they must do to accomplish that goal. This thesis examines the intentions, motivations and actions of Antifa by dissecting what they are, who they are, and how they work. I will provide a brief history of the movement in its various recorded forms—both in the United States and Europe. In addition to examining the stated goals and behaviors of the movement, I will assess and evaluate Antifa’s ideology by analyzing several key pieces of writing from their resource archives. Primarily, my goal is to determine the ideological legitimacy of Antifa’s efforts against those they have deemed fascist, and the legitimacy of the claims that it is members of Antifa who are the real perpetrators of fascist action in the United States.

This thesis explores the early career of Eduardo Paolozzi (1924 – 2005), focusing in particular on his artworks of the 1940s and 1950s. Predominantly known for his post-World War Two activity as an eclectic artist, designer and pedagogue, Paolozzi emerged as an experimental alternative to the modernist formalism of Henry Moore’s generation and remains one of the acknowledged leaders of an artistic movement that helped invigorate the British art scene. The sheer volume and diversity of his creative output, however, its wide-ranging use of descriptive materials and profuse interests, has legitimised the now standard reception of his work as one of wilful, perhaps even whimsical, eclecticism. Thus, he has become simultaneously codified as British artist, child of Surrealism, and ‘father of Pop.’ The thesis presented here intends to offset the standard historiography of Paolozzi’s artistic development, employing instead an interpretation grounded in the artist’s Italian roots and which takes into consideration his exposure to wider avant-garde movements and trends. Such a re-evaluation enables sense to be made of the imagery and ideas present in his work, and gives shape to the superficial incoherence of the ‘fragmentary’ phases apparently marking his output. What emerges is an alternative trajectory, one that moves from the early collages, full of L'Esprit Nouveau and Futuristic enthusiasm for the New World, through his use of Greco-Roman art, mechanisation and Uomo Novo during the years of Fascism, to the more concerted reassessment of the modern post-War world that is embodied in his satirical brutalist sculptures and proto-Pop demythologies, these last works mapping an emergence out of totalitarianism and the rediscovery of ‘democratic and international values.’ In this new analysis, Paolozzi stands as one of the few international figures who consistently developed a mature and idiosyncratic rationale through which a new, non-Fascist modernism was reformulated.

In this dissertation, I trace the contours of state control and capital in India, starting from the 1970s and see how the state’s increasingly centralizing tendencies and authoritarianism, in the service of capital, creates cultures of violence, fatalism, desperation, and ultimately, even more desire for authoritarianism. I study male stardom in Bombay cinema, beginning withAmitabh Bachchan (who was the reigning star in the 1970s and 80s), and following up with Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan (who have been successful stars from the early 90s), to understand how changing subjectivities, responding to changing socio-economic reality, were formulated and expressed through these star texts by the film industry. Through the study of these stars, I try to understand how dominant ideas of masculinities were being formulated and how misogyny came to be a prominent aspect of those formulations, because of social structures of caste and patriarchy as well as neoliberal precarity. I also study the cultures of fascist violence that have emerged in India under the rightwing Hindu nationalist BJP government in the light of increased individualization and self-commodification under neoliberalism. I contend that the socio-political system that enhances individualization and self-commodification and thus, gives rise to a heightened celebrity culture, is also responsible for the limits on the agency of the stars and celebrities through the formation of a totalitarian state. I study Indian prime minister Narendra Modi as the ultimate celebrity commodity text to understand the future of stardom itself in India.

Between 1935 and 1941, fascist Italy built an empire in East Africa at a speed and intensity never before seen in the world. Making Fascist Empire Work examines how Italy was able to undertake and organize this intensive, totalizing colonization. Analyzing four colonizing enterprises – an extensive mining concession in Wallega, the Bank of Italy in Addis Ababa, itinerant truckers, and settler farmers in Shoa – reveals that Italian entrepreneurs were essential to the colonization project. They provided the know-how, labor, and financing needed to carry out the regime’s ambitious plans. Moreover, these profit- and adventure-seeking entrepreneurs adapted their enterprises to the local environmental, economic, and political circumstances. They negotiated with local Ethiopian elites and Italian authorities. They also organized their own racial hierarchies of labor in their workplaces and homes. Often, Italian entrepreneurs contravened the fascist regime’s racial apartheid in order to keep costs low and profits high. Yet, the fascist regime knew that self-interested entrepreneurs and market forces alone could not rapidly build its totalitarian empire. Thus, each case study reveals how the fascist regime created specialized parastatal entities and deployed corporatist instruments to control industries, spur development, and strictly separate Italians and Ethiopians. The net result, I argue, was what I call “fascist settler colonialism,” meaning violent empire-building, made possible by the occupation, yet dependent on unleashing private enterprise that, in turn, had to be disciplined by the corporatist state. Over the short term of the empire’s life, the fascist regime was thereby able to supercharge imperial development. Making Fascist Empire Work makes three interventions in the fields of Italian and imperial history. First, its comparative approach reveals how practices creating racial and class boundaries strategically varied across the diverse empire in relation to an industry’s labor demands and the existing socio-political structures of the Ethiopian empire. It is the first study to do so. Second, it refutes the existing scholarship’s assertion that private enterprises were insignificant to the colonization. Instead, Making Fascist Empire Work demonstrates that Italian entrepreneurs actively participated in the imperial project and were central to its success. Moreover, it provides a new account of how fascist corporatism was enacted and contested in Italian East Africa. Its third intervention speaks to imperial history more broadly. Italian East Africa demonstrated that an organized corporatist economy could undertake rapid, intense, and extensive colonial development. It challenged and inspired other imperial powers to reconsider how they approached economic development in their colonies. Ultimately, Making Fascist Empire Work raises new questions about the significance and influence of Italian corporative colonialism on other empires in the interwar and postwar years.

The Victorian Author Thomas Carlyle was in his day a meteoric voice but his popularity and reputation declined significantly due in part to his link to fascism. In the politically polarized era of the Second World War, academics and propagandists dubbed him a fascist or Nazi in both defamation and approval. Fascist scholars pressed Carlyle into service as a progenitor and prophet of their respective totalitarian regimes. Adolf Hitler, in his final days, assuaged his fears of his imminent fall with readings from Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great. This fascist connection to the once esteemed “Sage of Chelsea” marks the apogee of his defamation. The following thesis sets Carlyle's decline in its historical context and demonstrates the presentist view scholars persistently take as they approach their subject. It further compares and contrasts the various fascist regimes, their distinct tenets, and their variegated ideologies that become evident in their interpretation and mobilization of the deceased Victorian's works.

The increase in Italian American political power from the 1920s through the 1940s coincided with the rise of Fascism in Italy and Americanism in the United States—two opposing ideologies that greatly influenced how Italians practiced political citizenship. Benito Mussolini’s Fascist ideology demanded Italians’ permanent subservience to the Italian corporate state, even to the seventh generation abroad. At the same time, American xenophobes pushed an aggressive platform of Americanism; an anti-immigrant ideology that demanded foreigners’ total loyalty to America, its Constitution, and its Anglo-Saxon culture. Scholars have separately noted Italian Americans’ overwhelming support of Fascism and the dramatic rise in their electoral participation during the Great Depression, but few have investigated the overlap between those two developments. None have placed Italian Americans’ growing ethnic awareness within the context of Americanism. This dissertation uncovers the causal relationship between Italian Americans’ Fascism and their newfound political capital, and demonstrates how ethnic elites pushed politicians from adhering to strict Americanism to accepting ethnic political citizenship and transnational activism. Beginning in 1930, Italian American elites made shrewd choices about how Fascism would spread and function in the United States to avoid government investigations. Italian immigrants first organized pro-Fascist clubs to find a collective purpose as transnationalistic citizens. Hoping to prove their value to Italy, immigrant elites first used their clubs to mobilize their growing communities in support of favorable terms of repayment for Italy’s World War I debt to the United States. The war debt campaign taught the Italian government and pro-Fascist immigrants that Italian Americans had potential for great political power, but only if they naturalized. To pursue naturalization and ethnic politics simultaneously they first needed to overcome their ideological conflicts with the Americanist values of total assimilation. Italian American elites resolved the tensions of choosing between Americanism and Fascism by bringing their communities together around an ethno-cultural nationalism, called Italianità, that pursued the ascension of Italian Americans in the United States and the supremacy of Italy in Europe. Italianità allowed immigrants to exercise transnational citizenship by using culture as a screen for advancing their political causes, helping them avoid criticism. Seemingly apolitical events organized by Mussolini’s supporters, like Columbus Day rallies, brought Italian Americans masses to the attention of American politicians at a crucial moment in electoral campaigns. The more active Italian Americans became in support of themselves and their homeland, the more aggressively American politicians courted their votes. By 1941, Italians had far surpassed Germans and Japanese in continual demonstrations of pro-Fascist nationalism through Italianità. Because they also eclipsed their co-ethnics in American voting power, the government largely ignored Italians in its extensive investigations of un-American activities before and after Pearl Harbor. This dissertation is the first to recognize the political roots of the government’s investigations into Germans and Italians and the resulting arrests during the war. The strategies employed by immigrant elites in the 1920s and 1930s enabled Italian ethnics to escape the mass internment and arrests of the 1940s. Rather than shrink from their ethnic identity, Italian Americans employed the full weight of their political capital to serve their community through the end of World War II.

Everything about fascism is aesthetic: this is what our thesis aims to demonstrate, based on the example of interwar French Fascism (1919--1939). It studies both discourses, symbolic practices, and literary texts, in order to show the multiple aspects of fascism's aesthetic dimension. Two theories, discourse analysis and sociocriticism, have guided us and permitted us to explain the interaction between aesthetics and ideology. / Our thesis is divided in three parts, each one devoted to one of fascism's central themes: the leader, the youth, and the group. In our first chapter, we examine the charismatic leader's many faces, among which are the poet and the warrior. We then show that fascism's discourse on heroism makes of the epic hero an ideological model and that, in its turn, this ideological hero greatly influenced Pierre Drieu la Rochelle's representation of the hero. But, as we indicate, Drieu's novels reveal that the cult of the hero is both a glorification of the self and a self-hatred. In our second chapter we examine fascism's cult of youth such as it was in Italy and Germany, after which we have demonstrated that, in a way, French fascism was an extreme radicalization of the contemporary French discourse on youth. Then, we analyse one of Robert Brasillach's novels which brings to the fore the dark side of fascism's cult of youth: its death drive. / In our last chapter, we unearth the aesthetic principles underlying fascism's political spectacle, principles that we also find at the heart of Drieu's texts. We consequently state that Drieu has adopted fascism's aesthetic years before he realized he had fascist ideas. Going a little further yet, we stipulate that Drieu thus reveals that the aesthetic was one of the main roads towards fascism. We then establish, in our final conclusion, a synthetic description of fascist aesthetics: an aesthetics of pathos, exhibition, sublime, violence, and death.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 219-240). / Microfiche. / xx, 240 leaves, bound ill., maps (some folded) 29 cm

The atrocities committed by the Nazis during the second world war meant that the public view of Nazism and fascism in the late 1940s and early 1950s was at a record low. In many countries the government actively sought to combat organizations professing a loyalty to fascism and many groups all over Europe struggled to find new followers and support in the post-war era. In wake of this there were an interesting development within post-war fascist organisations. As a result of their inability to gain support in their nations they began cooperating more with other groups across the borders. One interesting expression of this trend was the formation of a fascist international in 1951. Formed as a result of two international conferences, one in Rome 1950 and one in Malmö 1951, the movement sought to create a federal European state of nationalist states with the purpose of establishing Europe as a third power in the cold war, ideologically independent from the liberal USA and communist Soviet bloc. At Malmö it was decided to form an umbrella organisation named Europäische Soziale Bewegung (ESB), the European social movement. Furthermore, it was decided that the organisation would have permanent secretariat in Malmö which would be organized and led by a commission composed of Per Engdahl, the former SS-officer Karl-Heinz Priester, the French revisionist Maurice Bardéche and the secretary of the MSI Augusto de Marsanich. This study focuses on the correspondence of Per Engdahl during the years of the congresses in order to examine how the personal networks of fascist leaders helped create, form and maintain the international cooperation of ESB. Using the social network perspective argued by Ylva Hasselberg, Leos Müller and Niklas Stenlås, the study found that Engdahl’s connections with key figures in the extreme right played a key part in planning and organizing the congress as well as formulating the ideological programme and the organisations operation. Furthermore, the study found that Engdahl’s network was frequently used to share information and news from the various movements. The study thereafter concludes that Engdahl’s network is good example of how the post-war fascist organisation intertwined and helped develop the international currents of fascism. In doing so, the study contributes to the research of entangled history in transnational fascism studies.

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