A rhetorical examination of the rise of populist conservatism

I The People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States examines a variety of texts—ranging from speeches and campaign advertisements to news reports and political pamphlets—to outline the populist character of conservatism in the United States. Paul Elliott Johnson focuses on key inflection points in the development of populist conservatism, including its manifestation in the racially charged presidential election of 1964, its consolidation at the height of Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984, and its character in successive moments that saw its fortunes wax and wane, including 1994, the Obama era, and the rise of Donald J. Trump. theorizing conservative populism as a rhetorical form, Johnson advances scholarship about populism away from a binary ideological framework while offering a useful lens for contextualizing scholarship on American conservatism. I The People emphasizes that the populist roots of conservative hegemony exercise a powerful constraining force on conservative intellectuals, whose power to shape and control the movement to which they belong is circumscribed by the form of its public-facing appeals.

The study also reframes scholarly understandings of the conservative tradition’s seeming multiplicity, especially the tendency to suggest an abiding conservative unease regarding capitalism, showing how racist hostility underwrote a compromise with an increasingly economized understanding of humanity. Johnson also contests the narrative that conservatives learned to practice identity politics from social progressives. From the beginning, conservatism’s public vernacular was a white and masculine identity politics reliant on a rhetoric of victimhood, whether critiquing the liberal Cold War consensus or President Barack Obama.
 

Increased interest in Indonesian culture and politics is reflected in this work's effort to advance and reject various notions of what it means to be Indonesian. It also addresses perceptions of how Indonesia's citizens and state officials should interact. Because, in recent times, the Indonesian state has been so strong, much of the book is about state-sanctioned and state-supported notions of Indonesian identity and culture and efforts to come to terms with—or sometimes to challenge these official or dominant notions.

The contributions presented here represent a wide range of disciplines, points of view, and ideological orientations. Taken together they convey the notion that much might be gained if the idea were abandoned that a single understanding of what constitutes Indonesian culture is possible or desirable.

The collective memories of Nazism that developed in postwar Germany have helped define a new paradigm of memory politics. From Europe to South Africa and from Latin America to Iraq, scholars have studied the German case to learn how to overcome internal division and regain international recognition.

In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz examines three arenas of German memory politics—professional historiography, national politics, and national public television—that have played key roles in the reinvention of the Nazi past in the last sixty years. Wulf Kansteiner shows that the interpretations of the past proposed by historians, politicians, and television producers reflect political and generational divisions and an extraordinary concern for Germany's image abroad. At the same time, each of these theaters of memory has developed its own dynamics and formats of historical reflection.

Kansteiner’s analysis of the German scene reveals a complex social geography of collective memory. In Pursuit of German Memory underscores the fact that German memories of Nazism, like many other collective memories, combine two seemingly contradictory qualities: They are highly mediated and part of a global exchange of images and story fragments but, at the same time, they can be reproduced only locally, in narrowly circumscribed networks of communication.

As civil wars and insurgencies rage around the globe, Klaus Schlichte’s In the Shadow of Violence addresses a crucial question: why do some groups succeed in violently seizing and holding power while others fail? What makes for a successful non-state armed force? Arguing that success rests on the ability of these groups to transform the power of violence into legitimate domination, both inside their ranks and in the larger society, Schlichte explores the techniques and strategies they employ—and the long shadow of violence they must overcome along the way.

In this ambitious new history of the antiapartheid struggle, Jon Soske places India and the Indian diaspora at the center of the African National Congress’s development of an inclusive philosophy of nationalism. In so doing, Soske combines intellectual, political, religious, urban, and gender history to tell a story that is global in reach while remaining grounded in the everyday materiality of life under apartheid.

Even as Indian independence provided black South African intellectuals with new models of conceptualizing sovereignty, debates over the place of the Indian diaspora in Africa (the “also-colonized other”) forced a reconsideration of the nation’s internal and external boundaries. In response to the traumas of Partition and the 1949 Durban Riots, a group of thinkers in the ANC, centered in the Indian Ocean city of Durban and led by ANC president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Luthuli, developed a new philosophy of nationhood that affirmed South Africa’s simultaneously heterogeneous and fundamentally African character.

Internal Frontiers is a major contribution to postcolonial and Indian Ocean studies and charts new ways of writing about African nationalism.

Intonations tells the story of how Angola’s urban residents in the late colonial period (roughly 1945–74) used music to talk back to their colonial oppressors and, more importantly, to define what it meant to be Angolan and what they hoped to gain from independence. A compilation of Angolan music is included in CD format.

Marissa J. Moorman presents a social and cultural history of the relationship between Angolan culture and politics. She argues that it was in and through popular urban music, produced mainly in the musseques (urban shantytowns) of the capital city, Luanda, that Angolans forged the nation and developed expectations about nationalism. Through careful archival work and extensive interviews with musicians and those who attended performances in bars, community centers, and cinemas, Moorman explores the ways in which the urban poor imagined the nation.

The spread of radio technology and the establishment of a recording industry in the early 1970s reterritorialized an urban-produced sound and cultural ethos by transporting music throughout the country. When the formerly exiled independent movements returned to Angola in 1975, they found a population receptive to their nationalist message but with different expectations about the promises of independence. In producing and consuming music, Angolans formed a new image of independence and nationalist politics.