Blood Brothers

Abstract In British West African and Caribbean colonies in the 1930s fascism felt urgently close to people’s lived reality. Grappling with the nature of fascism, by comparing it with their lived reality under colonialism, became a site of critical intellectual debate. Yet genealogies of ideas about fascism have overwhelmingly tended to historicise and theorise fascism’s intellectual history from Europe. Histories that include arguments about fascism by colonised people nevertheless leave the impression that these debates occurred primarily among a few intellectuals living in metropolitan spaces, rather than in the colonies themselves. By mining newspapers as sites of intellectual debate, this article shows that questions about the relationship between colonialism and fascism encompassed broad plebeian and intellectual participants in a range of spaces. Their debate revises our intellectual genealogy of fascism by confirming that anti-colonialism was foundational to anti-fascism. It also revises our understanding of fascism. The embodied knowledge articulated by colonised peoples helps decipher fascism as excess by reconfiguring the very relationship between fascism and other political ideologies from one of polarities to one of proximity. When fascism is viewed from the perspective of colonised peoples, the base and root from which its excess springs comes into sharper relief