'Speeches Punctuated with Resounding Slaps': Law, Expansion, Hierarchy, Resistance

This workshop is the second in the ‘Fascism and the International’ series, involving scholars, artists and activists working in and across the fields of international law, history, history of art, international relations, postcolonial studies, sociology, anthropology, political theory, geography, sound studies, feminist studies, queer theory, critical race theory and beyond.

The first workshop in the series was held in June 2017 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, composed of a small group of legal scholars, historians, artists, political cartoonists, art historians and others. Our aim was to find ways of understanding and responding to the rapid re-centring of self-consciously fascist discourse witnessed in recent years, and to explore its connection to the formal division of the world, over the course of five centuries, into an assemblage of individuals, companies, nation-states and commodities.

The aim of the second workshop is to take this collaboration further by opening the project up to new contributors, and nailing down its implications for critique and resistance. For example, are the ‘speeches’ of our leaders — so quickly congealed into ‘hard’ international law — necessarily ‘punctuated with resounding slaps’*(to borrow a sound-image from the Futurists’ proto-fascist war on ‘passéism’)? If they are, must we meet this violence, meted out by law, with more law or with more violence? Are there other tools at our disposal?