Houria Bouteldja

'Bouteldja throws all our certainties into the air, and with brilliant precision, reassembles them' - Alana Lentin In Europe and North America, the white working class is increasingly tempted by right-wing political parties. Fascistic candidates and ideas seem to reap the fruits of social unrest everywhere. With her usual thought-provoking and unyielding insights, Houria Bouteldja shows how the history of the left explains this conundrum and how we can overcome it. Drawing from Black radical and decolonial Marxism, she shows that by privileging white constituencies, unions and left parties laid the foundations for a racial contract that binds workers and the poor to the state. However, there may still be a way out of this trap. Uniting ‘rednecks’ (the white working class) and ‘barbarians’ (the racially oppressed), requires a project of popular sovereignty, where national identity is transformed through revolutionary love. Looking to the future, Bouteldja imagines antiracism as a redemptive struggle aimed not only at rehabilitating marginalized communities but also at redefining white dignity.

A scathing critique of the Left from an indigenous anti-colonial perspective. Why am I writing this book? Because I share Gramsci's anxiety: "The old are dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." The fascist monster, born in the entrails of Western modernity. Of course, the West is not what it used to be. Hence my question: what can we offer white people in exchange for their decline and for the wars that will ensue? There is only one answer: peace. There is only one way: revolutionary love.—from Whites, Jews, and UsWith Whites, Jews, and Us, Houria Bouteldja launches a scathing critique of the European Left from an indigenous anti-colonial perspective, reflecting on Frantz Fanon's political legacy, the republican pact, the Shoah, the creation of Israel, feminism, and the fate of postcolonial immigration in the West in the age of rising anti-immigrant populism. Drawing upon such prominent voices as James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Jean Genet, she issues a polemical call for a militant anti-racism grounded in the concept of revolutionary love. Such love will not come without significant discomfort for whites, and without necessary provocation. Bouteldja challenges widespread assumptions among the Left in the United States and Europe—that anti-Semitism plays any role in Arab–Israeli conflicts, for example, or that philo-Semitism doesn't in itself embody an oppressive position; that feminism or postcolonialist theory is free of colonialism; that integrationalism is a solution rather than a problem; that humanism can be against racism when its very function is to support the political-ideological apparatus that Bouteldja names the "white immune system." At this transitional moment in the history of the West—which is to say, at the moment of its decline—Bouteldja offers a call for political unity that demands the recognition that whiteness is not a genetic question: it is a matter of power, and it is high time to dismantle it. This Semiotext(e)/Intervention series English-language edition includes a foreword by Cornel West.