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Bringing together leading scholars from a range of nations, Rethinking Antifascism provides a fascinating exploration of one of the most vibrant sub-disciplines within recent historiography. Through case studies that exemplify the field’s breadth and sophistication, it examines antifascism in two distinct realms: after surveying the movement’s remarkable diversity across nations and political cultures up to 1945, the volume assesses its postwar political and ideological salience, from its incorporation into Soviet state doctrine to its radical questioning by historians and politicians. Avoiding both heroic narratives and reflexive revisionism, these contributions offer nuanced perspectives on a movement that helped to shape the postwar world.
“This rich and comprehensive book opens up around the historiographical question of antifascism a series of passionate debates of which the last word has not been said.” • Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire
“…the volume makes a significant contribution to the international research field as it introduces the very latest studies on antifascism by Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French researchers to scholars in the English-speaking world…[It] makes a strong stand against revisionism and a significant contribution to the analysis of the limits and possibilities of antifascism, while refusing to reduce it to a form of totalitarianism.” • The International Newsletter of Communist Studies
“Comprised of seventeen eruditely informed and informative articles of impeccable academic scholarship, Rethinking Antifascism: History, Memory and Politics, 1922 to the Present, is a seminal body of studies that is unreservedly recommended for community, college, and university library Political Science references collections in general, and Fascism/Antifascism supplemental studies reading lists in particular.” • Midwest Book Review
“This is an important book. Examining antifascism from the twin perspectives of historical experience and historical memory, it offers an invaluable contribution to the newly developing field of antifascist studies. An impressive work of international scholarship, its expansive range gives readers access to a succession of fascinating events and debates from the 1920s to the present. This book makes a statement: it succeeds in ‘internationalising’ the study of anti-fascism and deserves the widest possible readership.” • Nigel Copsey, Teesside University
“Rethinking Antifascism does a commendable job of offering, for the first time in English, a panoramic view of the antifascist experience that resists the temptation to elaborate an ‘antifascist minimum,’ and instead embraces its multitude of individual and international varieties.” • David Ward, Wellesley College
Hugo García is Associate Professor of Modern World History at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. His publications include The Truth about Spain: Mobilizing British Public Opinion, 1936-1939 (2010), and he edited the Contemporary European History special issue on Transnational Anti-Fascism: Agents, Networks, Circulations in November 2016.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Beyond Revisionism: Rethinking Antifascism in the Twenty-First Century
Hugo García, Mercedes Yusta, Xavier Tabet, Cristina Clímaco
PART I: HISTORICAL ANTIFASCISM, 1922-1945: NEW PERSPECTIVES , NEW RESEARCH TOPICS
Chapter 1. Freedom for Thälmann! The Comintern and the Orchestration of the Campaign to Free Ernst Thälmann, 1933-39
Anson Rabinbach
Chapter 2. Was the French Popular Front Antifascist?
Michael Seidman
Chapter 3. ‘Beyond Cable Street’: New Approaches to the Historiography of Antifascism in Britain in the 1930s
Tom Buchanan
Chapter 4. Searching for Antifascism: Historiography, the Crisis of the Liberal State and the Birth of Fascism and Antifascism in Italy, Spain and Portugal
Giulia Albanese
Chapter 5. Was there an Antifascist Culture in Spain during the 1930s?
Hugo García
Chapter 6. Portugal within the European Antifascist Movement, 1922-39
Cristina Clímaco
Chapter 7. The Argentine Antifascist Movement and the Building of a Tempting Domestic Appeal, 1922-46
Andrés Bisso
Chapter 8. Women and Antifascism: Historiographical and Methodological Approaches
Isabelle Richet
Chapter 9. The Strained Courtship between Antifascism and Feminism: from the Women’s World Committee (1934) to the Women’s International Democratic Federation (1945)
Mercedes Yusta
PART II: POLITICAL USES, MEMORY WARS AND REVISIONISM FROM 1945 TO THE PRESENT
Chapter 10. From Antifascistas to PAF: Lexical and Political Interpretations of American International Brigaders in Spain and World War II
Robert S. Coale
Chapter 11. An Antifascist Political Identity? On the Cult of Antifascism in the Soviet Union and post-Socialist Russia
José María Faraldo
Chapter 12. The Burden of the Rear-view Mirror: Myth and Historiography of Republican Antifascism in France
Gilles Vergnon
Chapter 13. Did Revisionism Win? Italy between Loss of Historical Consciousness and Nostalgia for the Past
Stéphanie Prezioso
Chapter 14. Antifascism and the Resistance: Public Debates and Politics of Memory in Italy from the 1990s to Today
Filippo Focardi
Chapter 15. In Search of the Lost Narrative: Antifascism and Democracy in Present Day Spain
Javier Muñoz Soro
Chapter 16. Dictatorship and Revolution: Disputes over Collective Memory in Post-Authoritarian Portugal.
Manuel Loff and Luciana Soutelo
Chapter 17. Antifascism between Collective Memory and Historical Revisions
Enzo Traverso
Bibliography
Index