Munro Lecture - Professor Robin D G Kelly: 'Genealogies of American Fascism'

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"Ever since the right-wing insurrection on the U.S. Capitol building, there has been a tendency to compare the U.S. with the rise of the Third Reich. It’s been called our Weimar moment, or America’s Kristallnacht. The potential of fascism emerging in the U.S. I argue that these analogies are misguided, not because there is no fascism in the U.S. but, on the contrary, fascism is native to this country and its roots are much longer and deeper. Building on the insights of Black intellectuals in the 1930s and ‘40s who argued that fascism’s European roots are in the colonial order (an argument they made before Hannah Arendt), I will present a kind of schematic history or genealogy of American fascism from the 19th century to the present." - Professor Robin D G Kelly.

Professor Robin D G Kelly

Robin Kelly is Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. From 2006 to 2011, Kelly was Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California where, during the academic year 2009–10, he held the Harmsworth Chair of American History at University of Oxford, the first African-American historian to do so since the chair was established in 1922. From 2003 to 2006 he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia University. From 1994 to 2003, he was a professor of history and Africana Studies at NYU as well the chair of NYU's history department from 2002 to 2003. Kelley has also served as a Hess Scholar-in-Residence at Brooklyn College. In the summer of 2000, he was honored as a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the author of a definitive book on Theolious Monk. 

Professor Robin D G Kelly's staff profile at UCLA

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