Challenging cultures of rejection

ABSTRACT

In this article, Bojanic, Jonsson, Neergaard and Sauer present a synthetic overview of the five country cases included in the special issue that analyse the emergence of cultures of rejection since 2015. In general, they discuss the conceptual framework of ‘Cultures of Rejection’, elaborated throughout the issue as a more encompassing approach that is sensitive to the values, norms and affects that underlie different or similar patterns of exclusion and rejection in different contexts. These cultures are located in the everyday lives of people. The article, therefore, first identifies contexts, objects of rejection­—often migrants and racialized Others, but also ‘the political’ or state institutions—narratives and components of cultures of rejection that we label reflexivity, affect, nostalgia and moralistic judgement. The contrasting reading of the five cases shows that people struggle for agency under precarious and insecure conditions, and fight against imagined enemies. As Bojanić, Jonsson, Neergaard and Sauer conclude, cultures of rejection mirror ongoing processes of neoliberal dispossession, authoritarization and depolitization that culminate in a wish for agency and resovereignization. Second, and based on this overview, trends in cultures of rejection are detected against different national contexts as well as against common trends of social and economic transformations and crises, such as, for instance, the COVID-19 pandemic. This results, finally, in a discussion of ways of challenging the cultures of rejection towards more democratic and solidaristic societies. One starting point might be the ‘re-embedding’ of the economy in society, that is, a more equal distribution of resources and future perspectives.

KEYWORDS:

• affect
• democratization
• moralistic judgement
• nostalgia
• reflexivity
• rejection
• socio-economic dispossession
• solidarity
• transformation

Notes

1 Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Stefanie Kron, Mathias Rodatz, Maria Schwertl and Simon Sontowski (eds), ‘Der lange Sommer der Migration: Krise, Rekonstitution und ungewisse zukunft des europäischen Grenzregimes’, in Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Stefanie Kron, Mathias Rodatz, Maria Schwertl and Simon Sontowski (eds), Grenzregime III (Berlin and Hamburg: Assoziation A 2016), 6–24.

2 Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press 2019).

3 Cas Mudde, ‘The populist zeitgeist’, Government and Opposition, vol. 39, no. 4, 2004, 541–63.

4 Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity 2004).

5 Maurits Heumann and Oliver Nachtwey, Autoritarismus und Zivilgesellschaft: Eine empirische Studie zum neuen Autoritarismus, IFS Working Paper, no. 16 (Frankfurt: Institut für Sozialforschung 2021).

6 Philip Manow, Die politische Ökonomie des Populismus (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2018).

7 Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2018).

8 Heumann and Nachtwey, Autoritarismus und Zivilgesellschaft.

9 Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London and New York: Verso 2018), 11.

10 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. from the Italian by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers 1997), 395.

11 Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso 1988), 162.

12 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press 1985).

13 Benjamin Opratko, Manuela Bojadžijev, Sanja Bojanić, Irena Fiket, Alexander Harder, Stefan Jonsson, Mirjana Nećak, Andres Neegard, Celina Ortega Soto, Gazela Pudar Draško, Birgit Sauer and Kristina Stojanović Čehajić, ‘Cultures of rejection in the Covid-19 crisis’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 44, no. 5, 2021, 893–905.

14 Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) 2007), 61.

15 Alexander Harder and Benjamin Opratko, ‘Cultures of rejection at work: investigating the acceptability of authoritarian populism’, Ethnicities, vol. 22, no. 3, 2022, 425–45.

16 See Manuela Bojadžijev and Benjamin Opratko, ‘Introducing “cultures of rejection”: an investigation of the conditions of acceptability of right-wing politics in Europe’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 57, no. 4/5, 2022, 205–218.

17 Irena Fiket, Gazela Pudar Draško and Milan Urošević, ‘Anti-politics as culture of rejection: the case of Serbia’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 57, no. 4/5, 2022, 279–296 (281–2).

18 Kristina Stojanović-Čehajić and Marko-Luka Zubčić, ‘Unmoored: resources for the rise of right-wing populism in everyday experiences of international maritime industry workers from Croatia’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 57, no. 4/5, 2022, 259–277.

19 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs 2019).

20 Stojanović-Čehajić and Zubčić, ‘Unmoored’, 270.

21 Ibid., 271–3, 276.

22 Benjamin Opratko, ‘Beyond pandemic populism: COVID-related cultures of rejection in digital environments a case study of two Austrian online spaces’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 57, no. 4/5, 2022, 297–314.

23 Alexander Harder, ‘“Everything has changed”: right-wing politics and experiences of transformation among German retail workers’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 57, no. 4/5, 2022, 219–235 (219).

24 Celina Ortega Soto, ‘Swedish cultures of rejection and decreasing trust in authority during the COVID pandemic’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 57, no. 4/5, 2022, 237–257 (237).

25 Ibid., 238, 239–40, 241.

26 Harder and Opratko, ‘Cultures of rejection at work’, 430.

27 Stojanović-Čehajić and Zubčić, ‘Unmoored’, passim.

28 Ervin Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [1956] (London: Penguin 1990).

29 Opratko, ‘Beyond pandemic populism’, 304.

30 Stojanović-Čehajić and Zubčić, ‘Unmoored’.

31 Ortega Soto, ‘Swedish cultures of rejection and decreasing trust in authority during the COVID pandemic’.

32 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Randall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press 2011).

33 Harder, ‘“Everything has changed”’, 231.

34 Stojanović-Čehajić and Zubčić, ‘Unmoored’, 269, 272.

35 Ortega Soto, ‘Swedish cultures of rejection and decreasing trust in authority during the COVID pandemic’, 249.

36 Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity 2017), 1–12.

37 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1981), 114–16.

38 Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London and New York: Verso 2013), 8–22.

39 See (in this issue) Stojanović-Čehajić and Zubčić, ‘Unmoored’; and Ortega Soto, ‘Swedish cultures of rejection and decreasing trust in authority during the COVID pandemic’.

40 Engin F. Isin, ‘The neurotic citizen’, Citizenship Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 2004, 217–35.

41 Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or how to make things public’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2005), 14–41.

42 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press 2015); Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism; Jason Frank, The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2021).

43 Peo Hansen, A Modern Migration Theory: An Alternative Economic Approach to Failed EU Policy (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sanja Bojanić

Sanja Bojanić is Professor at the Academy of Applied Arts of the University of Rijeka researching the philosophy of culture with an overarching commitment to comprehend contemporary forms of gender, racial and class practices that underpin social and affective inequalities. Email: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4009-4422

Stefan Jonsson

Stefan Jonsson is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) at Linköping University. His research investigates political, cultural and aesthetic transformations of collective identities, social movements and colonial legacies in modernity. Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2007-3736

Anders Neergaard

Anders Neergaard is Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) at Linköping University. His research focuses on power, inequality, resistance and social movements, especially as linked to discrimination, racialization and racism, but also class and gender. Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7098-8611

Birgit Sauer

Birgit Sauer is Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of Vienna. Her research includes feminist-materialist theories of the state and democracy, gender and authoritarian right-wing populism, politics and affect. Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4857-7696