CUNY offers course on 'Global Antifa' to discuss 'antifascism' and 'racial capitalism'

In the spring of 2025, the graduate center at the City University of New York (CUNY) in New York City offered an English course entitled “Global Antifa,” the Washington Times reports. 

According to the course description, the seminar was based on “the premise that racialized and colonized peoples have been at the forefront of theorizing, challenging, and dismantling fascism, white supremacy, and other modes of authoritarian rule over the last century.”

The course covered topics such as “antifascist traditions,” “racial justice,” “anti-imperialist movements,” “intersectional feminism,” and “contradictions of capitalism.”

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Students read the works of Enzo Traverso, Aimé Césaire, Hannah Arendt, as well as “analysts of colonial fascism like George Padmore and Maaza Mengiste, feminist and queer critics of racial capitalism like Angela Davis and Audre Lorde, and writers on global authoritarian populism such as Roberto Bolaño and Arundhati Roy,” the course description reports.

Listed class reading material includes “Colonial Fascisms,” “Black Marxist Antifascism,” “Queer Antifa,” and “Eco-Fascism and Border Abolition.”

CUNY’s ‘Global Antifa,’ course sought to answer the question, “How can [authoritarian populist] regimes be resisted and how can futures of collective liberation be won?”

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The syllabus ‘Course Requirements’ section encouraged students to pursue “alternative forms of research,” such as “militant research” and “most efficacious ways to mobilize and disseminate knowledge around the crises of contemporary capitalism, liberal democracy, authoritarian populism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and eco-fascism, among other issues.”

On Sept. 22, the Trump administration declared Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” describing it as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise.”

Further courses offered in the current Fall 2025 semester by CUNY include ‘Global Feminism,’ ‘Settler Colonialism: Cinemas of the South Atlantic,’ and ‘Beach Politics: Social, Racial, and Environmental Injustice.’ 

Campus Reform has reached out to the City University of New York for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.