592953 results in History
1 - Legalizing Queer Life
- from Part I - Queer Partners and Parents
- Marie-Amélie George, Wake Forest University School of Law
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- Family Matters
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- 27 May 2024
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Summary
Before gays and lesbians could claim their full rights as Americans, they needed to overcome a host of laws and legal practices that created an imposing barrier to reform. This chapter provides a brief overview of the antiqueer world of mid-century America, detailing the myriad laws and policies that kept gays and lesbians out of public life. It then examines how and why lawmakers began decriminalizing homosexuality, detailing the demise of sexual psychopath, consensual sodomy, and vagrancy laws. It argues that the key to these changes was not lawyers, legislators, or judges, but rather sociologists – more specifically, Alfred Kinsey. His research revealed that same-sex intimacy was far from aberrant, which undermined the assumption on which the laws were based. His work influenced the thinking of leading legal scholars and advocates, who pressed for law reform.
7 - The Left Legacy
- Tirthankar Roy, London School of Economics and Political Science, K. Ravi Raman, State Planning Board, Government of Kerala
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- Kerala, 1956 to the Present
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- 31 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 119-133
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For years now, Kerala has had the distinction of being ruled by a communist-partyled coalition. The communist alliance won the first state assembly elections in 1957, lost in 1960, returned to power, and ruled the state in 1967–70 (first under E.M.S. Namboothiripad till 1969 and then under C. Achuthamenon), 1970–77, 1978–79 1980–81, 1987–91, 1996–2001, 2006– 11 and since 2016. In between, there were years when the state was under President's Rule, that is, the federal government governed it. The composition of the left coalition changed. It was never a body consisting of only the ideologically left parties: the Muslim League and some Christian factions allied with the communists. However, the main constituents of the coalition were the Communist Party of India (CPI) until 1964 and the CPI (Marxist), or CPI(M), after the CPI split into two parties.
In no other state of India, except West Bengal (and later Tripura), did the CPI or CPI(M) command a popular support base large enough to win elections. In common with West Bengal, tenants and agricultural labourers in these acutely land-scarce regions formed the main support base for the party. The communists won elections on the promise of land reforms. There was another historic factor behind their popularity. Caste equality movements coalesced around the leftist movement. Because of their commitment to the rural and land-dependent poor, the left delivered land reforms in Kerala and West Bengal in the 1970s. And in both states, ruling left parties indirectly drove private capital out of trade and industry. Ideological differences within the Communist Party of India led to a split in 1964. A faction led by S.A. Dange tended to have cooperation with the Indian National Congress, which then had a good relationship with the Soviet Union. That and the debates on National Bourgeoisie led to the split.
This is not a paradox. The paradox was that from the 1990s, if not earlier, the left quietly turned friendly towards private capital. By then, agriculture was in retreat, the old base of the left was not significant anymore, and the state was rapidly falling behind India in economic growth (and investment rates).
7 - Populist Islamism in East Africa: Elaborating Alternative Futures from Idealized Pasts
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
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- 15 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 138-154
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Summary
Introduction
Political Islamism and Islamic reform in East Africa have many strands, but their most salient forms can legitimately be described as populist since they position Muslims in East Africa as ‘little people’ marginalized by a Christian establishment and rhetorically use this opposition for political mobilization (Becker 2006; Loimeier 2011; Mudde 2017). It is also evident that history matters to these populists since they have much to say about historical events. It is harder to decide whether this form of populism should be seen as right-wing or left-wing since it combines calls for economic justice with pronounced gendered inequality and extols political emancipation while remaining vague on its desired political dispensation (Becker 2016; Kresse 2007; Willis and Gona 2013). Moreover, the collective of marginalized Muslim ‘little people’ is internally highly diverse in its religious practices, cultural affiliations, and political views.
This chapter uses a mixture of interviews, sermon recordings, informal conversations, and participant observation to explore how Islamists define a place for Muslims in East Africa's difficult present using claims about the past, historical change, and the future. It examines claims about past greatness and present decline, the dangers and promises of the afterlife, and the difficulty of making futures in this world. While a sense of present hardship and loss of direction is practically omnipresent in this discourse, it contains diverse and sometimes contradictory tropes that different adherents combine flexibly. A distinctive feature is the attention to the domestic realm and gender relations as a site of struggle to live a good life.
This case study, then, seeks to complicate the notion that the appeal of populism lies in its ability to simplify societal problems, which sometimes comes close to suggesting that populism appeals to the simple-minded. It chimes with studies that emphasize tensions and slippages in religious populists’ claims and strategies (Hadiz 2014, 2016, 2018; Baykan 2019; Peker 2019). Populists do strive to use simple oppositions, but since they operate in a messy world, their attempts to simplify tend to create their own complexities. More fundamentally, the tropes of populism work because they can mean different things to different people; because they are polysemous, an effect that has been observed long before the current wave of populist mobilization (Dubow 1995).
Foreword: Is There a Distinctly Populist Perspective on History?
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
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- 15 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp ix-xii
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Summary
The past few years have seen many kinds of inflation – among which there is an absolutely inflationary use of the word ‘populism’. Politicians, pundits, and, yes, also scholars tell us incessantly that we live in the ‘age of populism’ and that we are witnessing (or, for that matter, might be crushed by) a ‘populist wave’. The outcome of this inflation has been that many phenomena for which we have rather precise concepts – think of nativism, nationalism, and protectionism as obvious examples – are now labelled ‘populist’. This failure to distinguish impairs our political judgement. It has also arguably inflated the power of populism itself – it now appears that populism is omnipresent and that it is somehow an unstoppable political movement (after all, who can really stop a ‘wave’, let alone what Nigel Farage at one point called a ‘tsunami’?).
Against this background, one wonders whether looking for particularly populist approaches to history might not strengthen the unfortunate trend of conflating populism with all kinds of other phenomena. It is indeed problematic to label political positions that have, at best, an elective affinity with certain kinds of populism as populist as such; it is also misleading, in my view, to declare particular policies (let us say, on immigration or trade) populist as such. However, the case of history is different, and this volume shows why.
Populists, I hold, claim that they, and only they, represent what they often call ‘the silent majority’ or ‘the real people’. This appears to suggest no particular stance on policies nor, for that matter, commitment to any particular historical narratives. And yet this claiming of a monopoly of representation, usually phrased in moralistic language, does have two pernicious consequences, and these eventually also relate to the framing of history. First, and rather obviously, populists claim that all other contenders for power are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a disagreement about policies, or even about values, for that matter (which are, of course, normal and ideally even productive in a democracy); rather, populists say more or less directly that their political opponents are corrupt characters who are betraying the people (sometimes they label them outright as enemies).
5 - Memory, History, and the Politics of the Hindu Right
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
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Introduction
If, in writing history, we constitute the past and structure collective imagination, then the specific way we narrate the past becomes important in defining the shape of the national memory we produce and the vision of the nation that comes into being. This chapter looks at the way the Hindu right in India frames its history and envisions the nation. It suggests that we not only unpack the framing tropes of that historical imagination, but also the practices that reflect its attitude to the craft of history writing and the place of the historical profession within society. Populist regimes everywhere seek to refigure what counts as history.*
The internal dynamics of the Hindu right have always been shaped by a contradictory dialectic between constitutional politics and extra-constitutional activism, between the seemingly moderate and the aggressively militant voices. This conflict has unfolded differently over the decades. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the Hindu right could not expand its electoral base, though it continued its work at the popular level, opening schools where Hindutva history and Hindutva culture were popularised, doing social work, forming cultural and social organizations that were committed to the ideals of Hindutva. Even as late as 1984, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was not able to win more than two parliamentary seats. Disappointed with electoral politics, desperate to expand its social base, many within the Hindu right felt the need for a militant movement to forge an aggressive Hindu identity. L. K. Advani emerged as the aggressive face of the right – leading the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the late 1980s to build a temple for Rama, a major Hindu deity, in Ayodhya – and Atal Bihari Vajpayee appeared as the moderate voice. While Advani's efforts helped forge an assertive masculine Hindu identity, Vajpayee managed to form a coalition government in 1996.
In the early years of this century, during the time that Vajpayee was managing an embattled central coalition, Narendra Modi was fine-tuning a new militant Hindutva in Gujarat as the chief minister of the province. By 2014 he appeared as the unchallenged populist right-wing leader of India.
Introduction
- Marie-Amélie George, Wake Forest University School of Law
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- Family Matters
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- 27 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 1-28
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The fight for gay and lesbian rights has become one of the most conspicuous social justice movements in American history. Although numerous scholars and popular writers have detailed the history of the marriage equality movement, the struggle for marriage equality was only one small part of a more than half century-long movement for queer family rights. Decades before the United States became embroiled in debates over same-sex marriage, advocates were working to support and promote the rights of queer couples and their children. Family Matters uncovers this hidden history of gay and lesbian rights advocacy. Instead of focusing on marriage rights, it highlights the legal reforms that predated the marriage equality movement. The introduction sets out the book’s arguments and methodology. As it explains, the transformation of gay and lesbian rights in America depended on advocacy at the state and local levels, as well as the work of nonlegal actors.
16 - National Memory, Moral Remembrance, and Populism
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- By Lea David
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
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- 31 July 2024, pp 306-323
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Introduction
In his speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem in 2015, Benyamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, purported to describe a meeting between Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler in November 1941:
Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine].’ According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked: ‘What should I do with them?’ And the mufti replied: ‘Burn them’. (Beaumont 2015)
The past is a rich resource for populist exploitation as it is directly linked to moral boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter focuses on the questions of how national memory and moral remembrance have an effect on populism's moral and ethical relations to the past. According to Cas Mudde (2004), probably the most influential scholar on populism, morals are central to the populist appeal. Populism is a political stance that juxtaposes ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’. Populism relies on morals that determine ‘the pure’ and ‘the righteous’ values; hence, it is directly linked with disputes over the interpretations of the past. The rise of populism, which began in the 1970s and grew considerably in the 1990s and onwards, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. This is because the populist revelations on what are ‘pure’ and ‘righteous’ values always lean on allegedly ‘true’ and so far ‘hidden’ understanding of what transpired in the past. Hence, as we will see, historical revisionism and claims over victimhood and suffering are the bread and butter of every populist appeal.
Though the term ‘populism’ was first reported in American newspapers in the 1890s in the context of the rise of the People's Party (Kaltwasser et al. 2017), the scholarship on populism has grown considerably since the 1970s creating a dense and fertile field. One of the first definitions of populism was offered by Gino Germani, an Italian intellectual referring to it as a multi-class movement, which ‘usually includes contrasting components such as the claim for equality of political rights and universal participation for the common people, but fused with some sort of authoritarianism often under charismatic leadership’ (Kaltwasser et al. 2017: 5).
10 - Populism, Presentism, and the Prospects of Critical Historical Thinking in Russia
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
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- 15 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 192-208
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Summary
The ability to hear and understand the people, to see them through and through, to the full depth, and to act in accordance is the unique and main virtue of the Putin state. It is adequate to the people, along with the people, which means that it is not subject to destructive overloads from the counter currents of history.
—Vladimir Surkov (2019)Introduction
The current Russian government is revising the constitutional system and essentially curtailing the work of democratic institutions. In the process, it is increasingly turning to history as a means of self-legitimation. During the 1990s, which were difficult years for the economics of the country, ruling elites showed an indifference to history. Since the early 2000s, however, this indifference has been replaced, in the words of Alexey Miller, with ‘the escalation of historical politics’ (Miller 2012: 255), which has reached its peak in the third and fourth terms of Vladimir Putin's presidency. The authorities impose a correct picture, from their point of view, of the historical past with the help of school textbooks, large-scale multimedia projects, such as ‘Russia: My history’, and memorial laws (Koposov 2017: 207–299; Kurilla 2021), and even recently adopted amendments to the constitution.
In this chapter, I analyse the Russian government's uses of history. The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I discuss two theoretical questions: First, can the Putin regime be considered populist, and, if so, what are its defining features? Second, what uses of history are characteristic of contemporary populism and its Russian variant? I will claim that Russian uses of history can be characterized as conservative, drawing on a particular kind of presentism. After David Armitage, I would call this ‘teleological presentism’ (Armitage 2020). In the second section, I will show how this essentially conservative regime of historicity works in the Russian context by focusing on the use of the idiom ‘historical Russia’. This phrase is increasingly used today in official rhetoric when explaining domestic and foreign policy agendas. In the third and final section, I present my vision of an alternative historicity, which could become a challenge for the kind of presentism produced by the current Russian government.
Abbreviations
- Marie-Amélie George, Wake Forest University School of Law
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- Family Matters
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- 27 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp xv-xvi
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13 - Historiographic Populist Emotivism
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
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Summary
Introduction
It would be a stretch to claim to write about populist philosophies or theories of history because populism does not possess the kind of reflective systematic coherence that distinguishes philosophical theories. Still, it is possible to identify, I argue, a distinct populist attitude to historiography that can be derived from a political theory of populism. This attitude to historiography is expressed by the rhetoric, speeches, and speech acts such as tweets of populists from different parts of the world and different ends of the political spectrum.*
There is a great, indeed ever-increasing, variety of theories of populism. Even within the confines of this volume, no single theory or meaning of populism is accepted by all. I have advocated a theory of populism as the politics of the passions (Tucker 2020). Accordingly, I argue that populism approaches historiography as a narrative expression of the passions projected on the past. This passionate-emotive attitude to historiography generates corresponding values that judge competing historiographies according to their passionate intensity that expresses ‘authenticity’. Finally, I consider the more recent populist use of perspectivism, constructivism, and dialectics to confuse and silence its potential critics.
Populism
Populism, as I understand it, is the rule of political passions. This fits the classical Greek understanding of demagoguery and the Roman understanding of populism with the exception that populism is not exclusively of lower classes because elites are just as likely to succumb to their passions, while the common people may project their passions on elitist leaders. These passions override political interests and shape political beliefs. Pure passions tend to be self-destructive – for example, when people become very angry and burn their homes, start wars that hurt them more than their enemies, or demand economic policies that gratify immediately but generate inflation or accumulate debts that destroy the economy. As La Bruyere (quoted in Elster 1999: 337) puts it, ‘Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason, but the greatest triumph is to conquer a man's own interest.’
Harry Frankfurt (1988: 11–25) distinguished first-order desires from second-order volitions, wills about desires, what a person would like their desires to be and not to be.
Part I - Queer Partners and Parents
- Marie-Amélie George, Wake Forest University School of Law
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- Family Matters
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- 27 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 29-160
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8 - Historical Consciousness in the Age of Donald Trump: Populism, Evangelicalism, and the Typological Imagination
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- By Oz Frankel
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
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- 15 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 155-173
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Summary
Introduction
For admirers and detractors alike, Donald Trump's presidency signified a rupture, whether a revelatory inflection point on the brink of a national calamity or a nightmarish transgression of norms and dereliction of duty. Back in 2015, he was the ‘chaos candidate’. Ever since he amplified and dramatized a sense of crisis with the rhetoric he unleashed to announce threats and denounce enemies, both foreign and domestic, as well as through the venues he chose to engage the public, whether large public rallies or daily cascades of tweets (Moffit 2015). The crisis turned more acute and tangible towards the end of his presidency during the COVID-19 pandemic and the eruption of protests following George Floyd's death. It climaxed with the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, when belligerent language and populist rage turned into political violence.
Conflict, crisis, and the sense that a momentous shift is afoot, that the present in some sense is already historic, prompted an intense, both overt and implicit, engagement with the past in American public life. Allusions to the past proliferated in an effort to justify, condemn, or simply comprehend Trump, his politics, and his demeanour. The past, its memory and pedagogy, the meaning of national symbols, and questions about the mnemonic function of the state fed heated disputes and political skirmishes, especially over race and the legacy of slavery. While history was deployed in a volatile political landscape, invocations of the past – from whatever political camp – also indicated a desire for legibility and predictability, facing perceived threats, endemic insecurities, and a perennial gap between expectations and the reality of American life.
This chapter employs Trump and his tenure in the White House to explore the contours and content of the populist historical imagination in the contemporary United States of America (USA). A populist streak is discernible in American politics dating back to the 1830s. Historically, the term ‘populism’ carried a somewhat different valence in Europe, Latin America, and the USA. However, the current political moment signifies a convergence, exemplified, for instance, by Trump's cult of personality and authoritarianism; both were less pronounced in previous iterations of American populism.
Contents
- Tirthankar Roy, London School of Economics and Political Science, K. Ravi Raman, State Planning Board, Government of Kerala
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- Kerala, 1956 to the Present
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- 31 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp v-vi
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8 - Geography: An Asset or a Challenge?
- Tirthankar Roy, London School of Economics and Political Science, K. Ravi Raman, State Planning Board, Government of Kerala
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- Kerala, 1956 to the Present
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- 31 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 134-143
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Summary
The state's climate is unique among Indian states. Following the Koppen– Geiger classification of climatic regions of the world, over two-thirds of the land in India is tropical savanna, desert or semi-arid. Most of Kerala is monsoonal or highland tropics. The difference is this. The average summer temperature in the former regions can reach levels high enough to dry up surface water. The monsoon rains relieve that aridity, but only for a few months in a year. That dual condition makes water storage and recycling a fundamental precondition for economic growth. It elevates the risk of droughts and diseases from seasonal or periodic acute water shortages. Kerala, by contrast, does not get as fierce a summer as the other areas of India and receives a lot more rainfall. That dual condition implies a natural immunity from seasonal food and water scarcity and a low disease risk.
With its extraordinary biodiversity, this is a vast storehouse for natural resources. The state has a surface area of 38,855 square kilometres and is bounded by the Arabian Sea to the west and the Western Ghats to the east. The eastern highlands, the central midlands and the western lowlands, with 580 kilometres of coastline, can access a wealth of ocean resources and means of subsistence for their fisherfolk and the general populace. Compared with semi-arid India, the benign environment largely explains the head start in life expectancy (Chapters 1 and 6). Further, nature provides industrial resources that cannot be found elsewhere. The highlands have the ideal climate for growing coffee, tea and spices. Low hills are often planted with rubber. The seaboard traded with West Asia for centuries. The state's Gulf connection, thus, had a prehistory. A large tourism business has developed by selling nature.
On the other hand, recent experience shows that climate change and overdevelopment can jointly raise the risk of disasters. In the first three weeks of August 2018, Kerala received 164 per cent of the average rainfall for that time of the year. The following floods were devastating, comparable only to a similar event in 1924. In 2019, extreme weather repeated, now causing landslides. Mining and quarrying, frequent blasting and unscientific changes in land use patterns affected the highland ecology.
6 - Perpetuum Mobile: Neo-Ottoman Nostalgia as an Impossible Machine of Conquest
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
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- 15 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 121-137
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Summary
Introduction
Populism rarely travels alone. As cases such as Narendra Modi's ‘Hindutva’, Brexit's ‘Take Back Control’, and Donald Trump's ‘Make America Great Again (MAGA)’ show, populism often travels with nostalgia. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's authoritarian populism takes its fuel from neo-Ottomanism, a nostalgic rewriting of the Ottoman past, exemplified by the Conquest Rallies, massive public manifestations commemorating the conquest of Constantinople; the government-endorsed television series Resurrection: Ertuğrul, depicting the modest beginnings of the Ottoman Empire; and the Panorama Museum of Conquest, a state-led interactive museum, intended to ‘transport’ audiences back to 1453. How does authoritarian, right-wing populism pair so well with nostalgia? What is the ‘lost state’ that the Ottoman nostalgia so yearns to bring back, and what emotions go into its making? This chapter answers these case-specific questions while extrapolating that both nostalgia and populism, specific to and exemplified through this case, rely on binaries such as good versus evil, us versus them, and a glorious past versus a crumbling present. Together, these nostalgic and populist binaries create an ideal type, namely nostalgic populism. Nostalgic populism is a common modality of populist historicities and therefore requires close attention. Drawing from the 2020 reconversion of the Hagia Sophia to a mosque, I argue that the nostalgic populism in Turkey, which operates simultaneously through nationalist and imperialist logics, showcases three discursive characteristics vis-à-vis history:
1. Legalization of history: Nostalgic populism uses history as a legal precedent and as a legitimizing mechanism for policy. In the case of the Hagia Sophia, the regime refers to national sovereignty and Mehmed the Conqueror's will regarding the Hagia Sophia to present the reconversion decree as lawful.
2. Monopolization of history: The regime asserts its claim as the only legitimate one, declaring continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Because Mehmed the Conqueror saved the Hagia Sophia, a marvel, from the state of decay and ruin – the result of Byzantine neglect – Turkey, as the heir of the Ottoman Empire, reasons it has the main claim on this monument.
3. Revivification of stolen history: While other countries and the previous regimes in Turkey neglected Ottoman history, the Justice and Development Party, or the AK Party (hereafter AKP), gives the people the ‘right’ kind of history, a history the people have been deprived of thus far.
Part I - Global Varieties of Populist Politics of History
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
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- 15 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 29-30
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Index
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
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- 15 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 331-343
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5 - Combatting Violence
- from Part II - Straight Parents, Queer Children
- Marie-Amélie George, Wake Forest University School of Law
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- Family Matters
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- 27 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 165-196
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Summary
During the 1980s, the AIDS crisis unleashed a torrent of animosity against gays and lesbians. As hatred rose, so too did physical assaults. Most of the perpetrators were teenagers, who did not just torment queer adults – they also directed their anger and hatred at their peers. As a result, a substantial percentage of gay and lesbian youth dropped out of school, abused alcohol and drugs, and attempted suicide. Two types of violence consequently plagued queer life: violence from attackers and self-harm. Some advocates responded by focusing on preventing attacks on the streets. They worked with police to improve their responses and lobbied legislators to enact hate crimes protections, which helped make antiqueer violence visible. Others, typically teachers and parents of queer children, focused on creating support systems in schools, so that gay and lesbian teens would not give up hope for a better future.
3 - Recognizing Relationships
- from Part I - Queer Partners and Parents
- Marie-Amélie George, Wake Forest University School of Law
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- Family Matters
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- 27 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 96-130
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, During the 1980s and early 1990s, as the HIV/AIDS epidemic swept the country, thousands of gay men and lesbians perished from AIDS-related infections. Their same-sex partners quickly discovered that they had no rights because the law did not recognize their relationships. Advocates consequently pressed municipalities to adopt domestic partnership programs, a concept that originated in union efforts to secure benefits for unmarried partners. In the 1980s, cities, towns, and counties around the country began offering both health benefits to their employees as well as registries where all couples could record their commitment. The total number of these programs were small, and the rights they offered were limited. However, they helped produce new debates over the nature and meaning of family. They also inspired queer workers in the private sector to demand domestic partnership benefits from their employers. By the mid-1990s, domestic partnership benefits had become a mainstay of corporate America.
14 - ‘You Feel Me Bro?’ The Role of Emotions in the Construction of Collective Identities in Populism, Nativism, and Ethnic Nationalism
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- By Chris Lorenz
- Edited by Berber Bevernage, Ghent University, Belgium, Eline Mestdagh, Ghent University, Belgium, Walderez Ramalho, Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Ghent University, Belgium
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- Claiming the People's Past
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- 15 May 2024
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- 31 July 2024, pp 267-287
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Summary
Introduction
There was a time in political science and in political philosophy when emotionality and rationality were regarded as opposites and when the presence of emotions as such (especially of ‘passions’) in politics was seen as inappropriate, if not as outright suspect. Since the nineteenth century, many even liked to think that emotionality in politics was a preserve of unruly mobs and crowds. In democratic theory, politics was predominantly conceived as an arena in which various actors were basically pursuing their interests in a deliberate and rational way. Therefore, rational choice theory and coalition formation theory came to be seen as the best instruments to explain democratic politics according to most political scientists.
Since the ‘affective turn’ started in politics and in political thinking in the 1980s – spearheaded by philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Chantal Mouffe – this time is no more: emotions are increasingly appealed upon and taken seriously as objects of analysis (Nussbaum 2013; Mouffe 2005). Since then it is no longer possible in politics to criticize political opponents by simply unmasking that their beliefs and actions are based on emotions – and this obviously also holds for right-wing, exclusionary populism because political feelings are as old as modern politics itself (Frevert et al. 2022). Instead, the task of the critics of populism is to analyse the emotional repertoire used by populists in a comparative-historical perspective and to explain why it is successful in terms of mobilizing electoral support (Tietjen 2022; Demertzis 2019).
In this chapter, I address these issues by asking whether the emotions that populism appeals to form a specific set that distinguishes populism from other ideologies or discourses, especially from ethnic nationalism and nativism. However, in order to answer this first question, I first need to clarify the definitions of populism, ethnic nationalism, and nativism that I adopt. I depart from the well-known definition of populism formulated by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser and indicate the problems connected with this kind of definition in the light of ethnic nationalism. Then I elucidate the concept of ethnic nationalism and its relationship to populism because at least in Western Europe and in the United States of America (USA) they both appear to be very closely related.