Popular culture, post-truth and emotional framings of world politics

ABSTRACT

With the election of US President Donald Trump, the separation between high and low politics and the line between fiction and reality has become fundamentally blurred. Yet popular culture offers an important vector through which we might make sense of this political turmoil. The purpose of this essay is two-fold: conceptually, I examine how television provides opportunities for the insight into the visual and emotional registers of the post-truth era. I illustrate this empirically by examining two popular television series – Homeland and The Good Fight. I argue that the power of popular culture is derived from its visuality as the intersection of image and sound, through which emotional registers related to anxiety and outrage can be elicited and visually narrated. Even more so, the visual nature of popular culture has a strong affective component that shapes how we experience representations of reality and reveals the power and political significance of popular culture.

随着特朗普当选美国总统，高端与低端政治的分判以及虚构与真实间的界限都模糊不清了。倒是通俗文化提供了理解这政治乱局的途径。本文的目的有两层：一是在观念上思考电视如何为了解后政治时代的视觉及情感记载提供机会。作者分析了两部流行电视剧⟪家乡⟫、⟪傲骨之战⟫，指出通俗文化的力量来自声与像的结合，它使得与焦虑愤怒相关的情感记载可以发出并以视觉讲述。还不仅于此，通俗文化的视觉性质有很强的情感成分，决定着我们如何体验被呈现的现实，它显示了通俗文化的力量和政治意义。

KEYWORDS:

• Popular culture
• post-truth
• emotion
• visual politics
• television
• Trump

Notes on contributor

Constance Duncombe is Lecturer in International Relations at Monash University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical and interdisciplinary approaches to global politics. She has published on these themes in the European Journal of International Relations, International Affairs, and International Political Sociology.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For discussions on the intersection of rationality and emotions see Hutchison (2016), Mercer (2014) and Jeffery (2014).