Reading Fascists Reading Shakespeare: Literary Populism in White Power Fiction

Textus, 2021

Excerpts of COUP: Anthology-Manifesto, a radical response to the 2016 impeachment of Brazil’s former president Dilma Rousseff, appeared in English for the first time in Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism and Translation in June 2020. During the editorial process for the English translation, the Covid-19 pandemic hit the United States, revealing in stark relief the reality of income inequality and white supremacy rampant in the country, and late capitalism’s inability – and unwillingness – to properly address it. COUP, in the original Portuguese, was born out of 2016 Brazil’s political reality, and its English counterpart was similarly informed by the conditions that led to its translation. Purportedly antifascist academics must identify and deconstruct fascism in their work and themselves by applying both antifascist theory and practice to their approach. By drawing from the research of theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Umberto Eco, Freula Fernández, Maria Tymoczko, and Annarita Taronna, supplemented by a personal interview with Brazilian author Ana Rüsche, and incorporating an analysis of contemporary Brazilian and United States politics in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, the present work seeks to examine the immediacy of this deconstruction and how it manifests in the translation and editing process.

2020

Intervening in modernist literary studies and critical whiteness studies, this dissertation argues that modernist novels featuring largely white casts of characters and few themes or plotlines of overtly racial content are key sites for understanding how white people manifest their racial identities in subtle, indirect, and often unwitting ways. While it is taken for granted that race is a key factor in texts by writers of color, critics still tend to consider the racial dynamics of texts by white writers only when they involve primitivism, Orientalism, or scenes of interracial violence. This narrow framework exempts large swathes of white literary production from racial analysis simply because they do not feature overt racism or overtly racist representational forms. Through readings of novels by Jean Rhys, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Willa Cather, "Scattered Supremacies" uncovers forms of white supremacy more subtle and oblique than either white people's stigmatizations of people or color or overt proclamations of white racial superiority. I focus on novels that feature little to no interracial conflict between white and nonwhite people, novels where white characters are not consciously thinking about their own whiteness. Within these texts, I argue, whiteness emerges out of conflicts between different classes of white people trying to distinguish themselves from other whites. These intra-racial class conflicts involve moralistic identification with a range of economically coded and thus seemingly race-neutral virtues, such as hard work, independence, discipline, and the austere capacity to endure hardship. In clinging to a sense of themselves as embodying these virtues, white characters and their white authors are constantly managing the boundaries and connotations of whiteness, even if they are not consciously doing so and even if the people disparaged for lacking these virtues are other whites. The stakes of being able to recognize the kinds of economically coded racial discourse identified in these texts are especially high, for claims about the possession or lack of classically liberal, seemingly "race-neutral" virtues like industriousness, discipline, and self-reliance are an increasingly crucial part of how white supremacy is perpetuated under "colorblind" neoliberalism.

This thesis investigates the limitations and capacities of genres of the fantastic in their ability to represent the “break” between agency and structure, specifically the transformation of the former into the latter on the scale of radical social and political change. The transformation of utopian impulse to utopian programme is traditionally understood to present a representational impossibility—a “break”—and to require a shift into a less rigorous fantastic or magical representational register. This thesis considers this apparent impossibility to be a product of an ontology of atomised individualism that informs texts from mainstream Hollywood blockbusters to more putatively radical works of literature. It argues that these representations of agency, conceptually limited to individual action, occlude the reality and possibility of communal political agency. This thesis takes contemporary neoliberalism’s transformation of social structures and subjectivities to be driving this specific limiting effect on the ability to imagine alternative patterns of social relations and on the scope and potential of the imagination as such. Beginning with the development of a new political theoretical approach to fantastic literature, this thesis seeks to identify, through a series of close readings, the mechanisms by which this ideological work is performed by sf and fantasy texts, and then seeks to identify alternative representational techniques and strategies that overcome these limitations, allowing the societal imagination to think communal political agency, and move beyond the imaginative confines of the neoliberal horizon. Culminating in the work of China Miéville, this thesis finds that the effort to represent the “break” requires techniques and tropes taken from various genres, in order to capture the becoming—the producing and being-produced—of the world, of social structures, of communities and of subjectivities. The resulting literature has the potential to recruit the reader into occupying a position of radical, critical subjectivity—one which not only understands the malleable, constructed nature of social reality, but understands their own part in its reproduction, and the potential they wield, along with others, to alter it.

New Literary History, 2014

new literary history 550 fiction and fantasy, end up serving what Rancière calls the police. 2 And on the other hand, if the paradox of politics is that we project (in varying ways) what does not exist yet as a referent-a future, say, or those Rancière calls "a part with no part," or "the people"-then we need to credit fantasy, as it were before a referent. To conceive the political truly is to reject the limits of realist aesthetics and its mimetic illusion. At issue is not the real as such distorted by the fictive or fantastical as such, but forms of fiction or fantasy and what they make visible and what they occlude; at issue in politics, therefore, is judging not (only) the referentiality of fiction or narrative, but their generativity, and so also their implications if enacted. Faced with stunning forms of denial, of inequality, empire, or climate change, it is tempting to tell people to "face reality." The dangers in fantasy and fiction are manifest in so many ways that anxiety about delusion, illusion, self-deception, and disavowal is certainly justified. But there is no politics, and surely no radical politics, without "imagined community," collective identifications, visions of possibility. If politics depends on fantasy in these senses, then the task is not replacing the fictive with the real, but making political judgments about better and worse magic, about the worlds and subjects that different fictions (of the real) occlude or make visible, make impossible or available. 3 My second claim, therefore, is that some works of American literature, since Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" or Melville's Moby Dick, abjure a realistic aesthetic precisely to show, we might say enact, the central genres and fantasies constituting (American) political life, and to dramatize their staggering human cost. Great literary art has thus dramatized not only how American politics is founded on disavowals-of social bonds, history, or of what blackness signifies-but also how such disavowal is one side of "monomaniacal" investment in particular fictions, of personal and political sovereignty, of national unity, progress, or innocence. (Scholars thus argue that certain genres govern American political language, such as jeremiad, romance, and melodrama, as each joins what Leo Marx called the pastoral to what Hofstadter called the paranoid.) 4 Because American politics bespeaks the conventions and expectations of certain genres, I will argue, literary art does not so much repeat as rework them. Indeed, when political rhetoric does not conform to the conventions of realism, but takes on forms of what I call political romance, genres of fabulation-like the ghost story, allegory, tragedy, or farce-are in fact needed to dramatize the investments, disavowals, and specters constitutive of American political life. By fictional representation of the genres of national fantasy, literary artists make visible what is, as a condition

This paper reviews the concept and the corpus of English literature and its development in the context of culture and the academy from the 18 th Century onwards. I argue that the category of literature is a 'liquid' notion best understood as a form of 'social action' (after Eagleton) relevant to wider social, cultural, and political contexts that produce and 'consume' it. In the academy, through extending the notion of the institution to a wider social and political context, literature could be best understood as an 'institutional reality' reflecting perceived relations of power. Deeming literature as an ideological tribute is crucially important to arguing against the monolithic and essentialist (Anglo-American literary tradition) as embodying a universal value that still prevail in post-colonial institutions. This argument helps conceptualise and interrogate the cultural constructs embodied in English literature, in general, and the English canonical texts, in particular; it also makes it possible to refute the claim that literature transcends its local boundaries and nationalist sentiments to articulate the universal concerns and values of all people. In my approach to these claims and assumptions, I resort to a critical narrative review to the 'story' of the English literature in cultural, political, social, geographical and institutional contexts.. In academy, particularly in post-colonial settings, I conclude that the adopted literary tradition reflects a matrix of relations of power and institutional affiliations. Such conceptualisation of literature helps to challenge the claim that English literature largely embodies a humanistic enterprise of universal values and uniform human experience. Literature has been subordinate to the fluidity of cultural tenets, which in themselves have undergone several historic, paradigmatic, and institutional transfigurations and perversions. Both the notions of culture and literature are subject to similar social and historical trajectories. 'Institutionalising' literature has epitomised the concept and determined its value, and how it mirrors wider cultural relations of power. Drawing on these observations, I argue that there always exists interplay between the text and the wider context responsible for producing and disseminating literature, which intersects with institutionally established ideologies and practices. I understand the notion of context to refer to the 'system' or the 'institutional cultural capital ' (Bourdieu, 1998) that is responsible for normalising and regulating textual knowledges, and which projects literature as an 'institutional reality '. As Popatia (1998) argues, the interaction between text and context is often governed by an ideological and hegemonic discourse that seeks to prove itself as the most legitimate.

2019

Fascism tends to be relegated to a dark chapter of European history, but what if new forms of fascism are returning to haunt the political scene? In this book, Nidesh Lawtoo considers Donald Trump as a case study to illustrate Nietzsche’s untimely claim that, one day, “ ‘actors,’ all kinds of actors, will be the real masters.” In the process, Lawtoo joins forces with a genealogy of mimetic theorists—from Plato to Nietzsche, via Tarde, Le Bon, Freud, Bataille, Girard, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy—to show that (new) fascism may not be fully “new,” let alone original; yet it effectively reloads the old problematics of mimesis via new media that have the disquieting power to turn politics itself into a fiction.

The aim of this paper is to examine the ideas and theories of Hayden White, one of the luminaries in the studies of History and Literary theories. To examine the aspects of Philosophy, Psychology, History, and Sociology especially in literary canon is the universal experience at the present time. The paper tries to assist the readers about getting the meaning of historical justification and develop a kind of knowledge that is beneficial in understanding his ideas. History is one of the important ways to scrutinize literature, in the same way literary practices are engaged in producing history. This paper tries to find how Hayden White in his essay, ?The Historical Text as Literary Artifact? provides the evidences of history, is to be constructed of the narrative strategies developed commonly in producing any work of arts. This paper observes how Hayden White effectively institutionalizes history to be containing fictitious elements and how the past events are processed with the contact of imagination to arrange historical dialogue.

Contemporary Literature, 2008