The Racial Politics of Circulation: Trumpicons and White Supremacist Doxai

Abstract

This article presents the racial politics of circulation as a critical concept for elucidating how whiteness, nationhood, and doxa intertwine to reinforce and amplify white supremacy within a context of white nationalist postracialism. As a case study, the authors investigate how two popular slogans associated with Donald Trump drive the production and circulation of digital doxicons called Trumpicons and how such Trumpicons, in turn, feed back into a socio-political loop of white supremacist logics. In studying how Trumpicons become embroiled in such racial politics of circulation, the authors disclose how new media images contribute to an affective economy of whiteness in contemporary American culture.

Notes

1 We would like to thank Zosha Stuckey and Maria Novotny and her students for feedback on early versions of this article, as well as Rhetoric Review reviewers Hugh Burns and Barry Brummett for their generative reviews.

2 Trumpicons could also be considered memes; yet while we agree that Trumpicons are part of Internet memetic culture, we consider Trumpicons as digital doxicons to tease out how doxa, emotions, and fantasy get stuck to them and contribute to an affective economy of whiteness.

3 Rodríguez notes that “fantasy and desire . . . arise in coordination with power and domination” (95).

4 As James Baldwin put it: “American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist” (128).

5 Similar to Ahmed’s analysis of the Aryan Nation and hate in Cultural Politics (43-61).

6 The idea of political correctness dates back to the late eighteenth century but common contemporary understandings can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s, when U.S. left-wing movements used the term as a way to push against systems of power as expressed in our formal and informal discourse.

7 In August 2015, Trump tweeted: “So many ‘politically correct’ fools in our country. We have to all get back to work and stop wasting time and energy on nonsense!”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laurie Gries

Laurie Gries is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric and the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She is author of Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach to Visual Rhetorics and co-editor of Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric. She can be reached at [email protected].

Phil Bratta

Phil Bratta is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Oklahoma State University. He has published or has forthcoming work in edited collections and journals, including College Composition and Communication, Computers and Composition, Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, Visual Culture and Gender, and The Journal of American Culture. He can be reached at [email protected].