Memory and Right-Populist Appeals

• In Event: Vice President-Designated Panel: Poland: Cultural Mechanisms of (Right-wing) Political Upheaval

Abstract

In this work I use the example of the Poland to illuminate the constitutive elements of the recent turn to the populist right in global politics. I argue that one of the overlooked elements concerns the process in which the elites re-imagine nations in racial terms. First, I propose the concept of mnemonic capital, with which I explain the nostalgic longing for bucolic past permeating the right-populist appeals. Mnemonic capital refers to a politically productive symbolic resource that accrues to political players based on their turn to, and judgment of, the past. Second, I explain how right populist parties harness their mnemonic capital by ontologizing political differences. Ontologizing refers to a process, in which political distinction stops being a matter of contestable, programmatic positions, and it becomes a conflict of essentialized enemies. In other words, it is a process that reshapes democratic competitive give and take, into a field of zero-sum identitarian politics in which positions became fixed, by being narrated as if biologically determined. Third, I explore the connection between memory, politics and the continuing process of imagining the nation, by exploring Polish politico-cultural elites’ narratives of past communism and it is putative coincidence with Jewishness. In this work I not so much trace the construction of races, bur look at the way nations are re-made, when they are narrated with race-like fixity.

Author

• Kate Korycki, Queen's U (Canada)