The Rise of Fascism in the Dutch Empire and Its Black Radical Critics

Jacob Boersema, New York University

This paper reconsiders the rise of European fascism through a decolonial sociological lens, foregrounding the contributions of the Black radical thinkers Otto and Hermina Huiswoud—figures whose intellectual and political trajectories bridge the histories of colonialism, communism, and anticolonial resistance. Drawing on recent scholarship that reinterprets fascism as not merely a European phenomenon but one rooted in imperial domination, this study situates the Huiswouds’ critique within the longer genealogy of “colonial fascism” articulated by thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, George Padmore and C.L.R. James. By tracing their lives and work across Suriname, British Guiana, the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe, the paper reconstructs a transnational Black radical sociology that understood fascism and colonialism as mutually constitutive systems of racial-capitalist rule. The first part of the paper follows the Huiswouds’ political formation in Harlem within the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), and later the Negro Worker, a key site of intercolonial exchange. Their political practice challenged both Eurocentric Marxism and liberal humanitarianism by centering the global color line as a structuring force of modernity. The second part examines their participation in the Hands Off Ethiopia campaign of 1934, a pivotal moment of anticolonial antifascist organizing that revealed the interconnectedness of European and colonial violence. The Huiswouds’ engagement with Pan-African, communist, and labor networks demonstrates a form of political sociology from below—one that produced theory through movement, correspondence, and solidarity rather than from academic institutions. For decolonial sociology, the Huiswouds’ legacy offers crucial lessons. First, it invites a methodological shift from national to imperial frames of analysis, insisting that European modernity—and its crises—cannot be understood apart from colonial governance. Second, it exemplifies an epistemic reorientation that privileges Black radical archives, itinerant intellectuals, and the lived sociology of resistance as valid sources of sociological knowledge.

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 Presented in Session 218. Race and Space