Truth, Media, Psychopolitics: A Roundtable Conversation on _Paranoid Publics_

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable is organized as an engagement with Zahid Chaudhary’s important and timely new book _Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth_ (Fordham UP, 2025). Taking up a range of cultural phenomena, from whistleblowers, Q-Anon conspiracy theories, and right-wing discourses of freedom to mysterious medical illnesses, Paranoid Publics explores the landscape of what pundits have been calling our “post-truth” world. Working largely with material from the U.S., Chaudhary reads the denigration of facts and truth now characteristic of contemporary culture through a critical apparatus attentive to the psychosocial as a necessary complement to the political-economic tradition that has largely attended to the politics of truth and authority. In a cultural moment overwhelmed by the proliferation of movements against public health measures, election denialism, ethno-nationalism, sex panics, and the rise of vigilante militia groups, he productively deploys psychoanalytic concepts---paranoia, fantasy, hysteria---to analyze not the absence or overcoming of truth (not, then, the literalism often attributed to post-truth) but the conditions through which truth is now produced and contested. In his terms, paranoia in particular is a crucial conduit for contemporary games of truth, one that importantly does not have purely partisan appeal but runs through the constitution of publics from all sides of the political spectrum. In its comprehensive grasp of psychoanalytic critical traditions, _Paranoid Publics_ offers an innovative and much needed interrogation of the paranoid dynamics of public culture that have remained largely unnamed, let alone so incisively and at times elegantly explained. By making a case for a psychosocial readings of the political present, _Paranoid Publics_ expands our notion of the political.

Engaging the book’s central concern for paranoia as both symptom and lens for understanding the complex terrain of the political present, panelists will consider a range of questions, including the following: In a media scape of de-referentialized assertions and “alternative facts,” how do we avoid retreating into the defense of truth claims and of deliberative reason? What constitutes resistance when paranoia affects all political projects, right wing and those emanating from the left? At the same time, how do we understand the potency of paranoid dynamics for far-right radicalization and mobilization in contemporary global politics? And, in a seeming stretch of Chaudhary’s objects of study, how might we respond to his provocations in the context of the insecurity and devaluation of teaching and research in a market-driven and increasingly politically paranoid university?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Robyn Wiegman, Duke University

Panelists

• Christina León, Duke University

• Bruce Robbins, Columbia University

• Brian Connolly, University of South Florida

Comment

• Zahid R Chaudhary, Princeton University

Biographical Information

Zahid Chaudhary is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University where he teaches courses in postcolonial studies, photography and visual culture, cultural studies, and literary theory. He is the author of Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India (Minnesota, 2012, and Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth (Fordham, 2025). Other scholarship includes essays on the relationship between visual representation and colonial violence, race and contemporary cinema, Walter Benjamin, allegory, and mimesis. His interdisciplinary interests include both feminist and queer studies, the reconfiguration of national literary studies in the context of globalization, and the critical traffic between postcolonial and transnational analysis. He has presented papers at various interdisciplinary venues, including the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference and the American Studies Association. Professional address: English Department, 22 McCosh Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544. Email address: zrc@princeton.edu.

Brian Connolly is Associate Professor and current Chair of the Department of History at the University of South Florida. He is a historian of sexuality, the family, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. He is the author of Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in the Nineteenth-Century America (Penn 2014) and co-editor of Situation Critical: Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies (Duke 2024). He has published articles and essays in numerous venues, including History of the Present, Feminist Theory, Post 45, Parapraxis, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is the founding co-editor of History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, where he has also convened two special issues, one on “Slavery and the Archive” and the other on “Psychoanalysis and History.” He has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently working on two book projects, one entitled The Family and the Phallus: A Partial History of Desire, the other entitled Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Nineteenth-Century United States. He is a frequent participant in American Studies Association annual conferences. Professional address: SOC 273, Department of History, University of South Florida, 4204 E Fowler Avenue, Tampa, FL 33620. Email address: bconnolly@usf.edu.

Christina A. León is Assistant Professor of Literature at Duke University. She specializes in literary, anticolonial, critical race, psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theories, with a concentration on Latinx and Caribbean literature, art, and thought. Her scholarly writing focuses on the interplay of materiality and semiosis to better theorize and attend to works by authors and artists who often become known only through their geographical and identificatory markers, overdetermined by grammars of race, coloniality, and gender. She is the author of Matters of Inscription: Reading Figures of Latinidad (NYU Press 2024). Currently, she is working on two book projects: Catachresis: Notes on Troping Difference and Textures of Return: Material Movements in Caribbean Gender and Genre. Her articles and essays have been published in Women and Performance, ASAP/Journal, Diacritics, GLQ, Sargasso, Small Axe, Representations, and Post45. She serves as the co-editor of the Gender Theory book series at SUNY Press. She has been a regular presenter at American Studies Association conferences. Professional address: Program in Literature, Box 90670, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708. Email address: christina.leon@duke.edu.

Bruce Robbins is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a widely admired critic of contemporary global politics. His most recent publications in his areas of concern---nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial studies---include Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford, 2022); Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (Duke, 2012); and Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, 2007). He has edited Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (Minnesota, 1990) and The Phantom Public Sphere (Minnesota, 1993); and co-edited Cosmopolitanisms (with Paulo Horta, NYU, 2017); Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (with David Palumbo-Liu and Nirvana Tanoukhi, Duke, 2011); and Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (with Pheng Cheah, Minnesota, 1998). He was co-editor of the journal Social Text from 1991 to 2000. In 2013 he directed a documentary film entitled Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists. His short documentary “What Kind of Jew Is Shlomo Sand?” was released by Mondoweiss in the spring of 2020. His latest book, Atrocity: A Literary History is forthcoming in 2025 (Stanford). Professional address: 605 Philosophy, Mail Code 4927, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 1150 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY, 10027. Email address: bwr2001@columbia.edu.

Robyn Wiegman is Professor of Literature and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University and former co-director of the Dartmouth Institute on the Futures of American Studies (1997-2004). Her most widely read monograph, Object Lessons, focuses on the critical contexts and historical development of U.S. academic inquiries into race, gender, sexuality, and nation. She holds a PhD in American literature and culture from the University of Washington, where she specialized in the nineteenth and twentieth century. She has published American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995) and numerous anthologies, including The Futures of American Studies (with Donald Pease, 2002); Women’s Studies on Its Own (2002); and Feminism Beside Itself (with Diane Elam, 1995). She is the former director of Women’s Studies at both Duke University (2001-2007) and the University of California-Irvine (1997-2000). She is currently working on a monograph titled Arguments Worth Having. In 1998 she was a member of the program committee for the ASA annual conference. Professional address: Program in Literature, Box 90670, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708. Email address: rwiegman@duke.edu.