Dienstag, 21.10.2025
Ringvorlesung "Politische Kipppunkte" - Racial Fascism, the Global Police State, and Abolition Feminist Resistance
18:00 - 19:30 Uhr
Hörsaal 5, Innrain 52e
Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich
Eintritt / Kosten: Keine
Vortragende/r
Vanessa E. Thompson
Vanessa E. Thompson is Distinguished Professor for Black Studies and Social Justice, and Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, Canada.
She works on the relation between state violence and racial capitalism; abolitionist resistance and geography; black social movements and activist feminist ethnographies.
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For many months, the US government has been conducting a mass hunt for undocumented workers and is building the largest deportation project to date, with the further externalization of prisons in parts of the Global South, such as El Salvador. We are seeing more and more images of migrants being picked up on the streets of many US cities by ICE officials, loaded into cars, and deported without further notice—the externalization of the border as a prison. New budget packages from the Trump administration will lead to thousands of people dying in the coming years due to lack of access to healthcare, the closure of hospitals and nursing homes, and massive cuts to social security. At the same time, the further militarization of the police and deportation institutions, as well as the expansion of the military-industrial complex, are in full swing. The EU continues to co-finance militias in Libya, plans to deploy surveillance aircraft over the Atlantic, and is currently negotiating with Cape Verde on externalized border operations off the coast of West Africa, after border externalization in North Africa is already well advanced. In Gaza, following AI-controlled mass killings and bombings, more than two million people are threatened with displacement and starvation as weapons of mass murder and genocide. In Germany, which is Israel's second largest arms supplier after the United States, the internal persecution and criminalization of migrants and the poor, especially welfare recipients, continues and intensifies, and civilian areas are also to be made war-ready in this current conjuncture of militarization. In most of these and other contexts, trans people are being deprived of their existence and left open to attack. In many parts of the world, we are increasingly observing processes of fascistization, not only in the Global North, but also in countries such as India, Argentina, and Kenya.
This talk discusses how analyses of racial fascism, grounded in the black radical tradition, can help us better understand the current processes of fascistization. Drawing on works from George Padmore, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, and more recent rearticulations of their work (Toscano and Kelley), I first discuss the relation between colonialism and fascism. In the second part, abolitionist analysis and critics of processes of fascistization are fleshed out, with a focus on abolition feminist contributions. In the final part, the limits and potentials of historical and contemporary anti-fascist organizing are discussed from an abolitionist feminist perspective.
Veranstalter
Forschungsplattform Center Interdisziplinäre Geschlechterforschung Innsbruck