Taking its cue from Amiri Baraka's claim that Black Reconstruction contains a theory of "racial fascism", this talk will try to reconstruct the key elements and arguments that comprise Du Bois's theory, with particular attention to how Du Bois accounted for the compromise between the plantocracy and northern capital after 1877 - and for Jim Crow as a functional 'regionalisation' of fascism in the USA - as well as for the psycho-political dynamics underlying the conscription of poor whites into racial fascism. The talk will also reflect on how Du Bois theorisation of racial fascism can be put into dialogue with later debates on the applicability of fascism to racial capitalism in the USA.

Alberto Toscano is Term Research Associate Professor at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010; 2017, 2nd ed.), Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle, Zero Books, 2015) and the co-editor of the 3-volume The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (with Sara Farris, Bev Skeggs and Svenja Bromberg, SAGE, 2022). His Terms of Order: Keywords for an Interregnum (Seagull) and Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso) were published last year. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and is series editor of The Italian List and Seagull Essays for Seagull Books.

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