“Cultures of populism: institutions and hegemonic practices” – a brief introduction

ABSTRACT

This short Introduction sets the context for the nine articles included in Safundi’s special issue on “Cultures of Populism: Institutions and Hegemonic Practices” (Vol. 21, no. 3) by establishing connections with the colloquium of the same name that was hosted at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 10th until 13th July 2019. At the conference, populism (whether of the political right or the left) was examined in relation to democracy, the role of elites, and possible futures for the Humanities. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, papers considered the diverse histories of populism, as well as varied occurrences of this phenomenon across the globe.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• democracy
• elites
• institutions
• future of the Humanities

The manifestation of various forms of populism across the world has become an arresting phenomenon in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, receiving rapidly growing attention from political analysts, media pundits, and academics or independent researchers alike. For the readers of Safundi, striking instances might include Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States, the groundswell of support for Bernie Sanders’ vision of radical reform, the Zuma era in South Africa, and the emergence of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) under the leadership of Julius Malema. Identifying such examples frequently prompts lively debate about terminology, social or historical context, or the scope of pertinent interpretation. Populism studies have become a fluid and challenging field.

From an empirical point of view, scarcely a day passes without the print and electronic media’s reporting on putatively populist events. At the time of writing this text in late April 2020, Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nixon had just published a shrewd evaluation of “Why Populists Want a Multipolar World.” Taking its starting point from Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić’s scornful attack on the European Union for conspicuously failing to support its member states during the coronavirus pandemic, this essay highlights the salutary effects of prompt Chinese intervention. Reviewing the stock populist ingredients of anti-elitism, anti-pluralism, the delegitimation of political opponents, and the assertion of moral authority, the authors suggest that many populist regimes would be better served by “an international system composed of multiple great powers rather than one or two superpowers.”¹ Even at the price of incurring hidden obligations to China or Russia, it is suggested, such an arrangement would advance nationalist (and nativist or otherwise exclusionary) agendas, while neatly curtailing both the overt and the implicit influence of liberal democracies – not to mention the controlling power of the United States. So current affairs feed into the proliferating discourses seeking to mediate news for public consumption; events and their corresponding representations then continue in reciprocal exchange, with each transforming and being transformed by the other, often at dizzying speed ...

In an attempt to engage with these global forces, a colloquium on “Cultures of Populism: Institutions and Hegemonic Practices” was held at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, South Africa, in mid-July 2019. This conference was convened jointly by the Wits-Uppsala-Sussex research consortium in close association with the recently launched African Centre for the Study of the United States (ACSUS) at Wits. The inter-university group had already been engaged in productive collaboration for a decade prior to the colloquium. The core members of the team were specialists in American literature, who had successfully completed two shared projects, the first on “Mending Wounds” or the writing of trauma in North America and southern Africa, and the second on “Fictions of Threat: Security, Speculation and Surviving the Now.” The latter endeavor was anchored by four international colloquia involving scholars from the Humanities and Social Sciences, who explored the themes of securitization, risk, socio-political and ecological survival, and the contemporary prevalence of an apocalyptic imaginary.² “Cultures of Populism” was envisaged both as a self-sufficient investigation and as the catalyst for initiating a fresh research cycle addressing the future(s) of democracy, with particular reference to the potentialities of post-democratic formations. At the same time, the founding group was pleased to welcome formally the participation of its first institutional partner in the United States: the International Forum for US Studies (IFUSS), located at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign.

The African Centre for the Study of the United States was officially established early in 2018, the first of its kind south of the Sahara. Its guiding mission is the education of young African scholars in an understanding of the United States socially, politically, and as a global actor. The Centre further aims to promote appropriate research and policy encounters. As a multi-faceted organization, its interest in diplomacy and political analysis is balanced by a strong commitment to cultural exchange, giving due weight to both African and American perceptions. In view of its close alignment with the Centre’s mandate – not to mention the international reach of its affiliations – “Cultures of Populism” rapidly became a flagship project.

Thirty-two academics gave presentations at the four-day colloquium, which took on the atmosphere of an intensely focused think-tank. The call for papers began by asking whether “the emergence of what we might understand as a global populism demands a reconsideration of the limits of institutional forms of democracy and its cultures.” More specifically, the conveners wished to probe the dual role of the Humanities as generating the elite kinds of knowledge that inform democratic societies, while “equally engaging in the critical contemplation of elite, specialized or expert discourses of authority and power.” The invitation for papers was conceived as a succession of open-ended questions, branching out from the relationship between populism and democracy: could populism be construed as a response of the effectively disenfranchised to the failure of democratic initiatives, or might it perhaps signal a concerted attempt to reinvigorate occluded democratic values of the past? Alternatively, how and why had populism become so tightly intertwined with the promotion of nativism, racism, xenophobia, and exclusion? Opportunities were offered to examine the workings of populism on the Left or the Right, together with the corresponding discourses and symbolic systems. Prospective delegates were also encouraged to consider the recurrent connection between populism and violence (whether physical or structural), in addition to the deep or oblique histories and transnational geographies linked to populist energies. Lastly, the Humanities themselves were brought under the spotlight: had they fallen short of exercizing their prerogatives in useful ways – indeed, were academic institutions capable of exercising any power at all?

Because the colloquium was envisaged as an exploratory venture, it encouraged theoretical eclecticism and innovation. If speakers at the famous 1967 conference on populism at the London School of Economics struggled in their quest for a consensual definition of their key term, the Wits gathering held out no such expectation.³ Some delegates directly or implicitly adopted the pragmatic, ideational approach of Mudde and Kaltwasser, who describe populism as “a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.”⁴ Others drew on Margaret Canovan’s seminal study or Stuart Hall’s incisive account of the “authoritarian populism” whose values were to find secure purchase in the Thatcherite government of Britain during the 1980s. Still others took up Ernesto Laclau’s argument that the very vitality of populism lies in its divorce from ideology, in its capacity for uniting citizens across multiple divisions, and in its striking potential for producing radical democracy.⁵ Some speakers pursued imaginative styles of bricolage, adapting existing social or political theories and playing with philosophical possibilities, while resorting to figurative language, anecdote, or surprising chains of metonymic association. All these approaches contributed to the fresh adventurousness of the conversation.

The articles included in this special issue have been chosen both for their searching appraisal of particular aspects of populism and for their fruitful interrelationships, whether they are read by following the sequence set out on the contents page or are inter-linked in terms of their informing historical, political, and literary concerns. While such coherence in diversity is central, it is at once complemented and supplemented by the papers in a companion special issue of English Studies in Africa (Volume 63, no. 1). The articles in English Studies examine populism in a range of African settings, seek parallels with India, test future prospects for the South African universities, assay cultural memory, and review teaching practice in the multi-cultural contact zone. Some pieces also elaborate on, or qualify, the topics investigated in Safundi, many of which look to the United States for their chief ground or zone of analysis – or comparison. In this way, “Cultures of Populism” may be said already to have generated an intertext that is woven into the prevailing rhetoric, as well as current theoretical speculations and invocations of activism.

It would seem that Donald Trump is the star of this number of Safundi since he features in at least four of the nine articles. Yet Trump appears not merely in propria persona, but as a figure who gives back an image of his times, a conceptual node around which pressing political, ethical, and linguistic concerns coalesce. Stephen Clingman’s opening article treats the “Trumpian moment” as “antisematic,” combining politics and semantics in such a way as to evacuate the inherent meaning of meaning itself, with the media functioning as a “dark multiplier” in this process.⁶ Yet this language is seen perversely to depend on the fixity of certain symbols, such as the boundary, and notably “the wall.” Eiríkur Bergmann’s piece takes up the unique suitability of the online media for disseminating so-called fake news, so that conspiratorial populists in Russia, Britain, and the United States are provided with a readily exploitable platform. In an undiscriminating environment, supersaturated with information, it seems that everything may be true, thus prompting the assumption that nothing can be true.

Sorin Radu Cucu recalibrates the discussion of politics in the United States from the orientation of a “messy democracy” that gives Donald Trump attractive opportunities as a self-proclaimed outsider, speaking with the genuine voice of the people. Presenting himself as the mythical “savior” of the electorate, Trump is able to do battle against the “fake news” purportedly propagated by the media and, evidence seems to suggest, to collude with clandestine Russian interventions to his own advantage. This group of essays closes with Roderick Ferguson’s review of the contemporary role of queer of color critique, particularly its responsibility to engage the authoritarian tendencies of neoliberalism in a period of populist agitation. This paper takes its theoretical impetus from the Frankfurt School and the black radical tradition, suggesting ways in which critique might continue to evolve so as to meet the exigencies of the current moment.

If the first set of four articles is broadly concerned with political theory and analysis, the imbrication of our current vocabularies with contemporary events, the second set gives prominence to the literary, drawing on a variety of critical and philosophical resources. Harking back to the dawn of human sociality, Donald R. Wehrs traces the critique of power inequalities and a politics of resentment to the career of Thomas E. Watson, a Southern lawyer of the 1890s. Beginning as a reformer, Watson subsequently becomes a racist and virulent nativist. Through a reading of selected texts by William Faulkner, Wehrs suggests how literature might work to disentangle “justified revolt” from “reactionary resentments.” My own essay focuses on Henry James’s The Bostonians (1876), one of only two novels in which this author explores ideas of “the people,” popular movements, and socio-political reform. If the goal of “union” in the United States is shown to have failed in the wake of the Civil War and the Reconstruction, James grapples with representing the stresses and pervasive alienation of “inoperative communities,” to apply Jean-Luc Nancy’s term. Yet this problem is not simply historical or contextual; as Roberto Esposito has contended, communitas is fundamentally rooted in negativity, vulnerability, and the potential for injury. Moving forward to the twentieth century, Simon van Schalkwyk questions American democracy’s preoccupation with “the local” in order to “frame the populist parameters of poetic appeals to ‘the people.’” The Southern Fugitives’ autochthonous exclusion of African-Americans and Native Americans is poised against William Carlos Williams’ lyrical reflection on the limitations of imaginative projection and the strategies adopted for integrating “the people” into national allegories.

In “Asbestos Populism,” Arthur Rose ingeniously assesses “the relationship between asbestos and populism, as both terms travel across” different semantic zones. In this way, he develops a populist ecology which foregrounds asbestos as disconcertingly influential commodity. By teasing out appropriate strands of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, he also draws illuminating connections between Donald Trump’s current populist techniques and the earlier political maneuvers of Pierre Trudeau across the border in Canada. This issue closes with “‘Don’t tell me this isn’t relevant all over again in its brand new same old way,’” John Masterson’s passionate engagement with Spring as the third novel in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet. The unfolding dialog set up amongst Smith’s fiction, contributions to the Refugee Tales project, and Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics locates the Britain of Brexit within a web of transnational populisms, with their stark consequences of forced migration and xenophobia. Infused by these critical crossings, Smith’s novel comes to confront readers with “the darkness” of our populist present in its “rhetorical and material violence,” which is nonetheless conditionally alleviated by the possibilities for “creative response and resistance.”

“Cultures of Populism” as an academic event and a body of published material is thoroughly attuned to the disturbing darkness of our contemporary moment, as well as its twisting, complicated genealogies. The interventions in this issue of Safundi endeavor to throw some light on the situation – or at the least to address it thoughtfully, ethically, and responsibly.

Acknowledgments

Michael Titlestad and I would like to express our warm thanks to the editorial team of Safundi for the invitation to serve as guest co-editors of this collection of articles. Looking back to the “Cultures of Populism” colloquium itself, we are grateful for the generously sustained support of Professor Tawana Kupe, founder of the African Centre for the Study of the United States, and Professor Gilbert Khadiagala, its director. Sincere thanks are also due to our colleagues on the conference’s organizing committee: Dr. Adam Levin, Ms. Thulisile Mbatha, Professor Christopher Thurman, and Dr. Simon van Schalkwyk.

For financial assistance, we wish to acknowledge the Dean of Humanities, the Assistant Deans for Research, and the Faculty’s Research Committee, as well as the Research Office of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Through the African Centre for the Study of the United States, we have enjoyed substantial funding from the Ford Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Embassy of the United States in South Africa (including access to its “Visiting Scholars’ Program”). Without these significant contributions, the “Cultures of Populism” initiative could not have come to fruition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Merle A. Williams

Merle Williams is a professor emeritus of English and a research associate of the African Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She was principal organizer of the colloquium on “Cultures of Populism” which gave rise to this special journal issue. She is the author of Henry James and the Philosophical Novel: Being and Seeing (Cambridge University Press, reprinted 2009), and is completing a scholarly edition of The Awkward Age for CUP’s Complete Fiction of Henry James. An invited volume of her critical essays on James is in preparation. The edited collection Hospitalities: Transitions and Transgressions, North and South will be published by Routledge in 2021. Williams has produced articles and book chapters on the relations between literature and philosophy, Romantic poetry, and fiction from the nineteenth century to postmodernism. She has held visiting research positions in Germany, Sweden, and the United States.

Notes

¹ Cooley and Nixon, “Why Populists Want a Multipolar World.”

² A sampling of publications by the Wits-Uppsala-Sussex research consortium includes: Masterson, Watson, and Williams, eds. “Mending Wounds”; Titlestad, ed., “Catastrophism and its Limits”; Titlestad and Watson, eds. “The Ongoing End”/The Ongoing End (special journal issue and book); and Watson, introd., “Security Studies and American Literary History,” 663–786.

³ See Allock, “Populism: A Brief Biography,” 378.

⁴ Mudde and Kaltwasser, Populism, 6.

⁵ See Canovan, Populism; Hall, “The Great Moving Right Show,” 14–20; and Laclau, On Populist Reason.

⁶ Quotations in this and the following paragraphs are taken directly from the authors’ contributions to this number of Safundi.