Revisiting Policing the Crisis: Race/Immigration, Populism, Culture, and the Media in the Current Conjuncture

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

A specter is haunting the world: the specter of the populist far-right. In Europe, the “working class” has long shifted its allegiance from social democracy to the populist right. Trump seems to be attracting White working class in the US. Even in Latin America, the tide seems to have turned from populist left to the right. Media and cultural studies scholars have yet to develop comprehensive analyses of these major political transformations. There is, for example, a surprising lack of studies about the communication strategies of populist right-wing forces or the provocation/management of moral panics around immigration, particularly Islam and Muslims.

In this sense, there has been a change of direction in Cultural Studies since the publication of Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (PC). In that groundbreaking work, Hall and his collaborators analyzed how the hegemonic relations were re-constituted through an orchestrated spiral of moral panics about race and criminality. The formation of racial/ethnic identities and culture were analyzed as a way of studying the reconstitution of hegemonic relations. Hall et al. focused on culture as the terrain where the struggle for consent takes place through identity politics.

Policing the Crisis was prescient in its analysis of the emergence of “a law-and-order society” which evolved into the Thatcherite neo-liberalism and Hall subsequently called attention to the cultural component of Thatcherism that played a new game of identity, ethnicity and subjectivity through which the New Right gained the consent of the British working class. The basic theoretical concepts to understand this hegemonic displacement were ‘culture’, ‘common sense’, ‘hegemony’, and ‘moral panics/crisis’.

The participants in this panel will discuss how the central arguments developed in Policing the Crisis can be used to study the hegemonic struggles in the current conjuncture. Can the basic theoretical concepts still be used to understand the debates around racialized minorities and the right-wing populist upsurge or do we need to develop new conceptual tools? What is the role of culture in right-wing strategies for consent today? How does populism configure in the hegemonic struggles? What about the securitization of immigration? Where is the media in all this? What is the nature of the crisis and does the concept of moral panic still useful in understanding the shifts in public sentiment?

Sub Unit

• Ethnicity and Race in Communication

Cosponsor

• Journalism Studies

Chair

• Anamik Saha

Individual Presentations

• Crisis of Common Sense - Radha S. Hegde, New York U

• How Can We Use Policing the Crisis to Understand Current Hegemonic Struggles - Ferruh Yilmaz, Tulane U

• Policing the Crisis and the Production of the News - Anamik Saha

• Racializing the New Crisis - Charlton McIlwain, New York U