Presented by the Department of Literatues in English and the Society for the Humanities:

What Is Antifascist Theory? by Peter Coviello

This talk is an effort to bring into synthesizing contact a range of greatly, if differently, useful theorists of fascism, from the ones we might most readily imagine (Marx and DuBois, Césaire and Rodney, Bloch and Adorno) out to thinkers like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Jasbir Puar, Giovanni Arrighi, Joshua Clover, Melinda Cooper, Jordy Rosenberg, Benjamin Balthaser, and others. The aim is to make a sort of angular harmony out of these powerful, in some ways discrepant conceptual idioms, as we use them to think interpenetratingly about long histories of capital and dispossession, about racialization and security, about neoliberalism and the reign of political technocracy – all in the hope of getting some kind of usable analytic purchase on the calamitous present tense. We will conclude with a small meditation on the place, inside all this calamity, of the analytic literature we call “literature.”

Peter Coviello is a scholar of American literature and queer theory, whose work addresses the entangled histories of sex, devotion, and intimate life in imperial modernity. 

A writer of criticism, scholarship, and a range of adjacent nonfiction genres, he is the author of six books, including Make Yourselves Gods: Mormonism and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Chicago), a finalist for the 2020 John Whitmer Historical Association Best Book Prize; Long Players (Penguin), a memoir selected as one of ARTFORUM’s Ten Best Books of 2018; and Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU), a 2013 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. His book, Vineland Reread (Columbia), was listed among the New York Times’s “New and Noteworthy” titles for January of 2021 and his most recent book, Is There God After Prince?: Dispatches from an Age of Last Things (Chicago), was selected as a notable book by The Millions, The Lambda Literary Review, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere.

The editor of Walt Whitman’s Civil War memoir Memoranda During the War and of the Penguin Classics edition of Herman Melville’s short fiction, he writes widely as well for national and public-facing venues like Raritan, Frieze, N+1, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Parapraxis, and The Believer, where he has published on pop heartbreak, polygamy, higher ed, prayer, punk, Prince, and related life-enlarging ephemera. In 2017, he was appointed a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. He taught for sixteen years at Bowdoin College, where he was Chair of the departments of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Africana Studies, and English, and since 2014 has been at UIC, where he is Professor and Head of English.