Antifascist Atlantic: Anticolonial imaginations and the Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) is a conflict widely characterized as international in its scale and Spanish or European in its causes, without much attention given to the conflict's colonial implications. However, there are reasons to argue that the conflict, at the level of both causes and consequences, was connected to issues of Spanish imperialism in Latin America and North Africa as it was to the strictly European factors at play. In this essay, I privilege a perspective from the Global South rather than a Euro-Spanish understanding of this conflict. To that end, I write about the writings of Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén during the Spanish Civil War, both through their contact with well-known Republican leaders and with each other. Through these dialogues, Hughes and Guillén theorize the possibility of a Global North antifascism that, taken to its logical conclusion, becomes coherent and allied with Global South anticolonialism.