Ghosts of National Liberation:

Post-Fascist Repetition and Aesthetic Resistance in the Global South

This book (forthcoming with Routledge in 2027) contends that fascism’s defeat in Europe was catastrophically incomplete. In the decades after decolonization, fascist modernity was reanimated across the Global South through military dictatorships designed to defeat the ongoing struggles for national liberation. Far from being an aberration, these regimes formed part of the long history of capitalism, imperialism, and culture as a terrain of power. Tracing experimental art movements that emerged under dictatorships in Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the long 1970s, this book shows how artists confronted the double inheritance of colonialism and post-fascism. Working under conditions of censorship, violence, and exile, they transformed culture into a site of resistance by producing new forms of film, visual art, performance, literature, and music that challenged both imperial geoculture and fascist aesthetics. Bringing together Marxism, world-systems analysis, anti-colonial theory, and Pan-African thought, the book advances a bold claim, that the post-fascist and the postcolonial are mutually constituted, and their repetition is not only a history of defeat, but also a source of unfinished possibility. Through close engagement with figures such as Fanon, Mao, Wallerstein, and Sun Ra, it shows how experimental culture opens paths beyond historical capitalism by refusing closure, embracing failure, and insisting on the possibility of the new. At a moment when authoritarianism and fascism have once again gone global, this book insists that art is not an afterthought to politics but one of its most powerful weapons. By excavating the cultural struggles of the 1970s Global South, it reveals how new ways of seeing, hearing, and imagining the world can still break the repetition of empire and make another future thinkable.