Kunsthalle Wien

The White West. Fascism, Unreason, and the Paradox of Modernity is the result of a series of conferences. The third conference, Automating Apartheid, took place in 2020 at Kunsthalle Wien by invitation of the artistic directors What, How & for Whom / WHW (Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović).

Ever since neofascist movements began to surge across the globe, liberal commentators have tried to put a name to what they are defending from these illiberal ideologies. The consensus is reason or rationality – after the Second World War, mainstream scholarship has supported the view that adherence to fascism is a thing of unreason. This distinction between reason and unreason, a tenet of Enlightenment thought, sustains the universal appeal of liberal democracy but leaves unexamined the paradoxes that haunt modernity, particularly its colonial foundation, thus obscuring the continuities between fascism and imperial policies.

The White West contends that, without confronting the structuring force of race in the production and reproduction of global wealth disparities, fighting for reason only leads to flawed utopias in which a critique or disruption of capitalism is easily inflected in the direction of neofascism. This collection of writing by leading historians, theorists, and scholars is an attempt to engage the overlaps between philosophical predicates and colonial legacies, as well as the undertheorized continuities between fascism and settler colonialism.

Contributions by Norman Ajari • Ramon Amaro • Sladja Blazan • Larne Abse Gogarty • Donna V. Jones • Nitzan Lebovic • Olivier Marboeuf • A. Dirk Moses • Rijin Sahakian • Denise Ferreira da Silva • Nikhil Pal Singh • Kerstin Stakemeier • Felix Stalder