Alberto Toscano

Tracking the Boomerang: Once More on the Relation between Fascism and Colonialism

15 December 2025

The idea of a colonial or imperial boomerang, returning imperialist violence from the colonies to the imperial heartlands, at its most extreme in the guise of fascism, has served as an important critical optic through which to approach the circuits of global capitalist violence. Drawn from Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, where it is originally phrased as a choc en retour, and ascribed by some to the likes of Hannah Arendt or Michel Foucault, the boomerang can also unduly simplify the genesis and circulation of colonial and fascist violence, past and present. This talk will explore this notion, both in its intellectual genealogy and in its application to our conjuncture.

Required reading:

https://libcom.org/article/discourse-colonialism

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-boomerang-comes-back/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7399584/

Alberto Toscano is a theorist, writer, translator and educator. He is the author, most recently, of Communism in Philosophy (2025), Late Fascism (2023) and Terms of Disorder (2023). He edits Seagull Essays and The Italian List for Seagull Books and writes a regular column for the political magazine In These Times. He teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and lives in Vancouver.