CFP: Far-Right Revisionism and the End of the History: Alt/Histories

Historians have long described the fascist tendency to recast or idealize an imagined past, seen both in Benito Mussolini’s desire to create a new Rome and Adolf Hitler’s desire to make Germany “great” again. In Spain, after the loss of its colonies in 1898, the fascist Falange pushed a mythical vision of “Hispanidad,” a type of Spanish-Nationalism that attempted to recast the Spanish colonial period as benign. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Holocaust deniers already were proposing a revisionist history. Through the creation of alternate histories and facts, fascism’s impulse has long been to undermine historical research (and the Enlightenment project altogether) by re-writing and altering history in its attempt to legitimate essentialist, racist, ableist, sexist, ethnocentric, nationalist, and heteronormative beliefs.

An edited volume under contract with Routledge,  Far-Right Revisionism and the End of the History: Alt/Histories will bring together historians, anthropologists, neuroscientists, literary scholars, theologians, cultural critics, and sociologists to offer an interconnected and comparative collection which will be a definitive study for understanding how contemporary far-right, neo-fascist, Alt-Right, Identitarian, and New Right movements have proposed revisions and counter-narratives to accepted understandings of history, fact, and narrative.  Together, these essays will weave together questions of historiography, scientific investigation, historical imagination, and point to the ways the far-right in Europe and the United States has been using history and technology to reconstitute itself nearly a century after fascism’s ugly head first appeared. The essays included in this collection will be written in a way that is accessible to a general audience interested in the politics and histories of Europe and the United States.

Proposal Deadline: 20 March 2018

Essay Deadline: 1 September 2018

Please submit a current C.V. and a tentative title and 250-300-word abstract to Dr. Louie Dean Valencia-García (LValencia@txstate.edu), using the subject “Alt/Histories.” Contributions should be between 6,000-9,000 words in length.

The book will be divided into three sections. In an attempt to make this collection more cohesive, contributors will be asked to co-write a 2000-word (max) introduction/conclusion for the section to which they contribute over (due in Jan. 2018).

Potential topics could include (but are not limited to):

• Topics relating to specific far-right uses of histories/alternative historiographies (France, Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, etc.)
• Poland's controversial bill that outlaws blaming that country for any crimes committed during the Holocaust.
• Use of the Greek and Roman history by the far-right today
• Topics related to the Middle Ages and the Alt-Right
• Intersectional topics relating to Far-Right use of history
• School history textbooks as battle grounds in Europe and the United States
• Generation Identitaire and other Identitarian movements
• Constructions of “the West” by the far-right today
• Ways the far-right depicts colonialism/decolonization/Civil Rights/Black liberation
• Ethnic-Nationalism in Russia/Iran
• The Hungarian far-right’s use of history
• Understandings of “Cultural Marxism” and “Metapolitics” by the far-right
• The far-right and Brexit
• Antifascist tactics and the Alt-Right
• Traditionalism, Esotericism, and the Alt-Right
• Far-right movements and politics on university campuses
• Milo Yiannopoulos, Markus Willinger, or Richard Spencer’s use of history in their talks
• Use and origins of slogans such as “blood and soil” in contemporary far-right rhetoric
• Use of Islamophobic tropes by the far-right recalling the Crusades/the Spanish Reconquista
• Far-right attack of mix-raced teenager for portraying Joan of Arc in Orléans festival
• The far-right White supremacist historic memorial sites in the United States and Europe
• Cold War politics and Alternative für Deutschland today
• Antisemitism and the Alt-Right
• Use of Nazi, Christian, pagan, and Nordic imagery/mythology by far-right movements.
• Other topics related to ways the far-right uses/appropriates history…