RevDem Podcast

By Review of DemocracyNews Politics

RevDem Podcast episodes

October 03, 2024 If There Was Not That Principled Element of Protecting the Liberal in Us, There Would Be No Need for the Harder Edge - Nathalie Tocci on the EU’s Global Strategy
In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Nathalie Tocci – Director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali and part-time professor at the School of
Transnational Governance, European University Institute – discusses the direction the EU has taken in recent years in the light of its global strategy and how
far it has managed to become strategically autonomous; reflects on what principled pragmatism implies in the context of the rise of illiberalism; and considers what could change during the second European Commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen – and whether the EU’s centre of gravity might be shifting.
33 min
September 30, 2024 We Need Better Cohesion in Europe Because We Need Reforms and New Resources - Mikuláš Dzurinda on Slovakia’s Path, the European People’s Party, and the Future of Ukraine
In our latest podcast, Mikuláš Dzurinda – President of the Wilfried Martens Centre and former Prime Minister of Slovakia – discusses the changes that EU
membership has brought to Slovakia; reflects on the recent rightward shift in Europe and how this might influence the EPP's priorities; analyzes potential change in Slovak foreign policy and the relationship with Hungary; and argues for Ukraine’s NATO accession.

The conversation was recorded on September 19, at the Budapest Forum for Building Sustainable Democracies.
25 min
September 26, 2024 A Revelation for the History of Social Movements in Hungary: Bernadett Sebály on “The Story of Our Struggles” Database
In this conversation, Bernadett Sebály discusses the inception and development of the online database of protest events in Hungary, 1989–2010, entitled Küzdelmeink története, or “The Story of Our Struggles”; its use in pedagogical settings for students, activists, teachers, and everyday citizens; and the importance of
its place between activism and scholarly research in the Hungarian illiberal context.

32 min
September 23, 2024 What Leads Idealists into Morally Disastrous Territory? - Adam Kirsch on the Ideology of Settler Colonialism and Preferable Traditions of the Oppressed
In this new conversation at the Review
of Democracy, Adam Kirsch – author of the new book On Settler Colonialism. Ideology, Violence, and Justice – discusses the ideology of settler colonialism and how it leads idealists into morally disastrous territory; reflects on whether the application of this ideology to the State of Israel should be viewed as continuing the long, highly problematic tradition of antisemitism; considers whether there are valuable elements in
this ideology that would be worth salvaging; and suggests preferable ways to think about the traditions of the oppressed.
Adam Kirsch is a poet and literary critic. He is an editor of The Wall Street Journal’s weekend Review section and the author of a host of significant books that include The Blessing and the Curse. The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century as well as The Revolt Against Humanity. Imagining a Future Without Us.
On Settler Colonialism. Ideology, Violence, and Justice has been published by W.W. Norton.

35 min
September 17, 2024 How to Overturn the Tech Coup? - Marietje Schaake on the Erosion of Democracy, the Need for Global Regulation, and the Democratic Internet Policy of the Future
In this conversation, Marietje Schaake – author of the new book The Tech Coup. How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley – discusses how tech companies have been eroding democracy and what makes their growing power into a systemic problem; compares the policies of
democratic and authoritarian regimes; identifies issues where regulation would be urgently needed on the global level; and spells out crucial aspects of a specifically democracy-focused internet policy.
Marietje Schaake is international policy director at
Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at
Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Between 2009
and 2019, she served as a member of the European Parliament for the Dutch
liberal democratic party D66 and was among the leading personalities shaping
the EU’s policies on technology, trade, and foreign affairs. Marietje Schaake
currently serves on the United Nation’s AI Advisory Body and she also writes
a monthly column for the Financial Times on
technology and governance.
The Tech Coup. How to Save Democracy from
Silicon Valley is published by Princeton University Press.
21 min
September 13, 2024 True Romanianness - Marius Turda on Racism and Eugenics in Romanian History
In this conversation at the Review of
Democracy, Marius Turda – author of the new book În Căutarea Românului
Perfect. Specific național, degenerare rasială și selecție socială în România
modernă (In Search of
the Perfect Romanian. National Specificity, Racial Degeneration, and Social
Selection in Modern Romania) – discusses the intersection between
eugenics and racism in Romanian nation-building; presents the main historical
moments that influenced the evolution of eugenics and racism; and analyzes the
influence of interwar debates around eugenics and racism on socialist and
post-socialist Romania.
Adrian Matus: Most of your scholarship is addressed at reading publics
in English and you use academic
concepts that are familiar in that language. Your new book adds such
academic concepts to the Romanian
intellectual discourse to shed light on the coexistence of racism,
anti-Semitism, and eugenics. What motivated
you to want to write such a book? Were there any special
historiographical or conceptual challenges, or
maybe even limitations, when writing the book in Romanian
and for a Romanian audience? If so, how did
you try to tackle them?
Marius Turda: If you really
want to understand the present, you need to go back to the past. But one should
go back to the past in a way that allows the past to speak for itself rather
than reinvent it.
A lot of good books about Romania
that are very interesting theoretically speaking and very provocative
conceptually speaking are written from the point of view of adopting a
terminology or a methodology which worked in Colonial Studies, Subaltern Studies,
Decoloniality and so on, and then try to use this conceptual work to see how it
applies to Romania. My strategy, on the contrary, was, first and foremost to
tell the story. I want to revive the past through the work of a historian and
through the tools historians have at their disposal. Then, the reader can
actually encounter what happens and encounter an idea or a concept or an explanation
for a social phenomenon through the actual reading rather than through my eyes.
I very much hope that there will be
a conversation and theoretical debate after this book is published and
disseminated about racism and about eugenics. We still do not have a history of Romanian racism. We still do
not have a history of the eugenic movements in Romania. Of course, there is the
German eugenic movement, the Romanian eugenic movement, and then the Hungarian
eugenic movement, but the research on the Romanian one has never been done. An intense theoretical debate about certain crucial
moments from the past can only happen once the past is known rather than reinvented.
You might remember the conversation the
historian Lucian Boia and others had about mythologizing of the past. Now, I
could have done something similar to what Lucian Boia did. I could have written
a book about Romanian eugenics, biopolitics and racism, demythologizing it as
something that is bad, or something that
was alien to Romanians. The outcome would have been completely different
because then people would have said that you basically replace one
historiographic construction with another. My strategy may be considered very
unorthodox because obviously, people did expect me to use a lot of the terminology
that I have acquired through my work, to use that kind of English-speaking
terminology that is familiar to everyone who is educated in English-speaking
universities and to apply that to the Romanian context.
I did not do that in order to see
whether there is a fertile ground for a conversation whilst people know exactly
how diverse this phenomenon was, how complex it was, and how much it really
shaped the debate on national character and national specificity in interwar
Romania. If that is the case, then we could have a meta-debate or a meta-theoretical
conversation about what it all means. People could come and say this is very
descriptive and positivistic. Apart from the introduction, the book does not
have any secondary sources. It has 1000 footnotes – and all of them reference
primary sources. Every argument I put
would have required 5 to 10 secondary sources – just imagine how the book would
have looked like then.
My strategy could backfire. People
could ask why I did not offer more theoretical background to the book rather
than just present this argument in its simplicity. Prior to this, apart from
one or two people who knew something about eugenics, I could not have a
conversation about what I cover in this book because no one has actually put
this historical material together. What would be the point to discuss, for example
about disability without having an example of how it was understood in interwar
Romania? In the book, I provide the example of someone who murdered her son and killed
herself in a hotel in Bucharest because her son had disability and people were
throwing stones at him on the street. In parallel, there were discussions in
the Parliament whether to introduce eugenic laws and have premarital
certificates, so people with certain diseases would not have children. Through
such examples, we can have a talk about what it meant at the time.
This is in many ways very
pedagogical and didactic. We are in a culture in
Romania where these topics have not been discussed properly but there is a big
jump in terms of the theoretical argument. Particularly now, there are an amazing group of younger people
across the board – from sociologists to political scientists and historians – who
are very attuned to debates abroad and they are very keen to integrate into that
conversation and integrate the Romanian case study in that global debate about
various issues. Ultimately, this can only be
done if this new generation actually knows what exactly happened. Otherwise,
they end up constructing as much as they deconstruct – they construct via
deconstructing because what they say is basically another construction.
The general public finds it very
hard to follow a debate which is highly theoretical, particularly when it comes
to topics such as fighting racism in Romania, combatting xenophobia, or tolerance.
The person on the street will not accept any of that unless you come and show
what happens. Not just the Holocaust. Not just the deportation and the pogroms,
but the very strong streak within Romanian culture that really reach very deeply
in the Romanian population: the idea that we have to define ourselves not just
in terms of language or religion, but also in terms of blood and race. Every
single country has done it – Romanians are no different than Hungarians, Croats,
Bulgarians or the English. It is not
about being in a very unique position in
Europe. We imitated and copied, we followed and emulated so many Western
models. The entire Romanian historiography and
literature is rich with examples of how the Romanian revolutionaries of 1848
imitated the French revolutionaries. And as much as they adopted the idea of
patriotism from French political discourse, they also adopted the discourse
about race from that political tradition. It does not take that much
historical inquiry to put it all together, but it has not been done.
Hopefully mine is one step forward,
one attempt to really bring the conversation towards some very key moments in
the history of Romania and in the intellectual history of Romania, which in a
way allows us to re-read in a different key the period between the 1880s and
the 1950s and at the same time to shed some light on longue durée phenomena
in Romanian culture leading to the present day, particularly with respect to anti-Semitism,
racism, eugenic feelings and eugenic behavior towards people with disability,
and how the Romanian state behaves as it continues to adopt eugenic language.
MA: A
core argument of the book is that being a
Romanian was constructed via culture but that the
idea also acquired a marked biopolitical component in the 20th
century. So what did it mean to be Romanian at various
times? What main justifications were used to exclude those who were not considered
part of the national project?
MT: I tried to
offer some answers to this question in the book by looking at how, for example anthropology,
sociology or demography were used to define ‘Romanianness’. Before the 19th century, an entire
tradition already existed in the form of the Enlightenment Transylvanian school
that defined the Romanian as someone who spoke Romanian, lived for generations
on the territory that is today Romania, and was a descendant from either the autochthonous
population or from the synthesis created between Romans and the Dacians. There
were many ways in which historians of the Enlightenment were already formulating
a definition of Romanian identity.
In
the 1880s however, with the creation of Romanian state, a number of very
important novel elements came into the picture. The Romanian would need to be a
citizen of the new Romanian state - so a definition of the idea of citizenship
was required.
The
Jews were not Romanians by blood, but could they become, civically speaking,
Romanian citizens? That was a big debate. At the time, citizenship came to acquire,
as was the case in other countries too, a very powerful meaning, because it
could give one the quality of being a Romanian. The First World War and the
creation of Greater Romania then intensified the whole conversation about who
is Romanian, how can one define Romanian (because of the number of ethnic
minorities in the country - not only the Jews, but also the Hungarians and
Germans). The Romanians were constantly confronted with a need to redefine their
national identity; first in the 1880s, regarding the Jews, then again in the early
1900s, and then particularly in the 1920s regarding the other ethnic
minorities.
There
was always the idea that if an individual is Romanian citizen, that is
enough. But then, there was always
lurking in the backs of some minds that this attitude might be ruinous, that it
might actually delegitimize the Romanian national project and lead to a
catastrophe. Some would tell you that Emil Cioran[i] is
one of those who came up with one of the best questions summarizing the dilemma
of Romanianness: “How could you be or how could one be a Romanian?”
I
think there is another important question that was asked at the time that actually
encapsulates this debate and gives a good answer. This is a question asked by Nae
Ionescu[ii],
who asked it in the context of the debate he had with the Romanian Catholics. For
him, Romanian Catholics could follow the laws, pay their taxes, or in other
words, be model citizens, as many Jews, Germans, and Roma were. But, he says,
you could be good Romanians, but the essential question remains, “are you Romanian?” To me, this is extraordinary. You could see
the same tendency in the debate he had with Mihail Sebastian, where the
question was precisely not how much
Sebastian would try to become Romanian. Nae Ionescu considered Sebastian only as
a Jew from Brăila.
This
is the question that we need to go back to and try to understand when we are
looking at the complexity of the Romanian national project. These were Romanian
citizens, but were they Romanians because of their inherent ‘Romanianness’, not
acquired via political decision. I read
this particular article by Nae Ionescu when I was in my 20s and it took me so
long to understand what exactly he meant by the question: ”You are good
Romanians, but are you truly Romanians?”. It was only after I studied the entire
arsenal of arguments put forward by Romanian anthropologists, physicians and
eugenicists for really trying to find that essence, that palpable thing, that I
understood what he was referring to.
In
Europe, centuries worth of effort have been spent by anti-Semites and others
obsessed with the idea that if we can find the perfect Aryan and really
identify it, that will solve all of our problems. It was the same with Romanian
figures I am discussing. They really tried to say that it was not enough to
really go to the top of the mountains and claim, like Lucian Blaga[iii] that
“eternity was born in the village”. They wanted to go into the villages and
find a peasant that actually looked like a piece of unchanging history when you
looked at him: the way he had his beard, the way he peered into the distance,
the way he presented his persona – in other words, they wanted to know about
everything that concerned him that could actually be touched and felt. The physicality of the nation had to be
identified.
In this context, they could define what Romanian was: ideally not
only a Christian, but an Orthodox Christian, in other words part of the
national church, but also someone who did not have any Roma or Jewish blood,
ideally for three or four generations, if not more. If they had
some German blood that was not considered too bad, because that was thought as
belonging to a superior nation. Ironically, some of the most radical of these Romanians
were not of Romanian origin. It is the
same as everywhere: most fanatics, are those who are never able to overcome
what they call the ‘stigma’ or ‘shame’ of having impure blood. The quest for
the perfect Romanian, as I call it, was something that really drove the
conversation about national specificity.
Very
few people were able to actually really pinpoint how this idea of identity changes
- because it does change. I am not saying, for example, that a debate about
economic arguments, social conditions or the cultural debates about national imitation
are not important, but they could also be understood much better if they are
put in conversation, or if they are put
together in dialogue with this almost biological obsession people had about
finding that real Romanian that poets write about and philosophers muse about.
AM:
Who were the scientists that formulated these racial and eugenic arguments
about the Romanian nation in the interwar period?
MT: There were many,
some of them quite prominent: important psychiatrists like Gheorghe Marinescu[iv], important
physicians like Gheorghe Banu[v],
Iuliu Moldovan[vi],
demographers like Sabin Manuilă[vii],
as well as sociologists, poets, literary critics and genealogists. As I show in
the book, it is very interesting that there was a so-called ‘scientific’
literature on race and racism, both supporting
it and arguing against it. The
47 min
September 09, 2024 The Crowd Never Left the Scene… - Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury on Crowd Politics in Bangladesh
In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury – author of the recent book Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (Stanford UP, 2019) – discusses the various layers
of democracy in Bangladesh. Analysing the differences between the English word “crowd” and the Bengali term “jonata,” Professor Chowdhury deliberates upon the
recent events in Bangladesh through the lens of the country’s long history of popular dissent and street mobilization. She describes how the Western category of “the people” fails to capture the tenuous, fleeting, and ephemeral materiality of the crowd in the context of Bangladesh and beyond.
29 min
September 09, 2024 The Crowd Never Left the Scene… - Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury on Crowd Politics in Bangladesh
In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury – author of the recent book Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (Stanford UP, 2019) – discusses the various layers
of democracy in Bangladesh. Analysing the differences between the English word “crowd” and the Bengali term “jonata,” Professor Chowdhury deliberates upon the
recent events in Bangladesh through the lens of the country’s long history of popular dissent and street mobilization. She describes how the Western category of “the people” fails to capture the tenuous, fleeting, and ephemeral materiality of the crowd in the context of Bangladesh and beyond.
29 min
August 30, 2024 Commodification of Ethnic Sexuality and Social Belonging - George Paul Meiu on Political Representation and the Role of Objects
In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, George Paul Meiu clarifies his concept of ethno-erotic economy and the commodification of ethnic
sexuality; reflects on the role of objects in shaping political representations; discusses belonging and citizenship as well as mobility, memory, and materiality – and shares his insights concerning possible
interpretations of the Greek God Dionysus episode at the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games.
Adrian Matus: You have done extensive research on East Africa,
particularly Kenya. As a result, you published “Ethno-erotic Economies:
Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya”[i],
where you propose the concept of ethno-erotic economies to grasp what is going
on in the tourist resorts of the country. Could you tell me a bit about your main
findings concerning the Samburu ethnic sexuality and what they may tell us
about belonging in today’s postcolonial world more
generally?
George Paul Meiu: My project in ethno-erotic economy started in a very
specific place in Kenya. Since the 1980s, young Samburu men from Northern Kenya
have begun migrating seasonally to the coast of the Indian Ocean, where they
sold souvenirs and danced for tourists, but also increasingly started
developing relationships with women from Western Europe. By the time I started
doing research in 2005, in Northern Kenya–where these men come from–some of the
richest men in the area were in relationships with white women. For me, this
raised all kinds of questions. How do you commodify ethnicity and sexuality in
order to produce a certain kind of future at home? What does it mean for an
indigenous population like the Samburu, who have been marginalized and peripheralized
by both the colonial and independent states, to now seek a certain kind of
economic emancipation by commodifying colonial stereotypes of themselves and of
their sexuality?
Increasingly, what I started seeing is that this is actually very
little about sexuality, as such. This is not about what people do sexually.
This is about all kinds of imaginaries that one brings in terms of tourist
commodification, consumption and so on. What was really interesting for me was
how these things reverberate beyond tourism. I ended up going back to some of
these men's villages where I did the heavy part of my research and saw how the
money that they brought home gave rise to all kinds of gossip and debates over
what it means to make money through sex and feed your children and parents with
it. All of these moral dilemmas raise questions about what it means to belong,
to belong to that area and to an ethnic group. A lot of what these young men
were also doing was trying to use the capital they acquired through sexuality
to gain respectability.
In many parts of the world today, people use sex economies to
try to move to the West or other more affluent parts of the world. What was
interesting for me here is that these young men did not. Most of them wanted to
go back to their home village, where the value of the money was higher, where they
had the comfort of being at home and where the ability to negotiate
respectability was very different. This created all kinds of puzzles. What does
it mean to be a young man in your early 20s, to already have so much money and to
gain access to becoming an elder, a respected elder, through your sexuality?
All these conundrums raise the issues over what it means to belong. This is a
story about East Africa, about Samburu indigenous people and the colonial
discourses of their sexuality. In many ways, it is closely related to the global
phenomenon of intensified migration.
We see the commodification of ethnic sexuality everywhere. What
I mean by ethnic sexuality is the very modernist idea that we carry within our
bodies something that we can call sexuality.
On the one hand, we see across the world now a growing
commodification of migrants. I am currently doing research in Romania. A lot of
Romanian migrants in Western Europe– men and women–commodify their sexualities
and sexual economies, as Eastern Europeans and Romanians. This fantasy has very
strong repercussions. On the other hand, we see growing ethno-nationalism
everywhere that plays out in the name of sexuality and ethno-sexuality. Sexuality
becomes quite key in both consumption and governance in the contemporary world.
AM: In your book Queer Objects to the Rescue[ii],
you shifted and narrowed the focus of your investigation by pointing to objects
that play a surprising role in shaping political imageries that represent
queerness as a societal threat and the resulting practices to exclude queer
people. Your claim is that, if we want to understand and critique homophobia,
we need to understand the role of such objects. One of your central points is
that plastic plays an important role in this type of representation, as Chapter
4 of this book argues. What are the main reasons behind associating plastic
with queerness?
GPM: The deployment of political
homophobia has played a central role in morally legitimizing the sovereignty of
the state. In many contexts, the state actually works to monopolize capital and
claim monopoly on various forms of extraction and exploitation. In this very
moment, it seems to me that when we talk about these things, such as moral
policing and moral panics, our ability to imagine has become quite bankrupt.
When we talk about homophobia, for example, we end up
demonizing homophobes versus positioning ourselves as scholarly critics;
activists on a position of superiority to those irrational Others who hate.
While not condoning any form of hate or relativizing it, I do think that as
social scientists we have a responsibility–ethical and political–to try to
understand the conditions in which hate is reproduced, also.
Thus, working on objects was not necessarily an attempt to
narrow the focus, but to escape this discursive realm that keeps us trapped in a
kind of liberal, emancipatory discourse versus irrational, backward, demonic
hate dichotomy. We need to understand things differently. We need to step a bit
outside. Objects, in a way, did that for me. The paradox of homophobia,
xenophobia, racism, misogyny and hate towards migrants creates a globalized
grammar of hate. If these things indeed are global, then that still does not
explain how people and populations–vast populations across the world with very
different contexts of life, work and governance– pick them up.
These discourses have to be made to resonate. I was trying to
look at those poetics. How does a leader come in front of the masses and say: “your
children are in danger immigrants, are in danger of the homosexuals?” For
people to pick up, I do not believe these discourses that just assume masses
are these irrational, malleable things. In reality, we have to pay close
attention to the sentiments and desires that they are expressing. Therefore,
for me, objects became an interesting coincidental way to tap into the
production of collective sentiments. While doing previous research on my first
book in Kenya, I started seeing a lot of concern and panics over various kinds
of objects, and then I thought, how might panic over various kinds of objects tell
us something about the panics over homosexuals or immigrants?
Just to give a quick example, early on in my research I came
across a Facebook post by somebody in Northern Kenya who made a homophobic
statement. The way it was formulated was quite intriguing for me as an
anthropologist. It said that “homosexuality is a foreign plastic import that
doesn't fit African chemistry”. There's a lot of cultural and historical
baggage that goes into formulating and understanding what is being said here.
For me, this resonated because I had already started working in northern Kenya
on questions of plastic and panics over them. The fact that there is a whole category of
young men in the area called plastic boys, children of refugees who do
not claim any belonging to clans or lineages in the area, and therefore–like
plastic–seem to come from elsewhere and never attach themselves to any
particular place, is significant. Plastic became a very evocative medium,
object, or set of objects, that gave a certain kind of material expression to
anxieties over belonging, autochthony, bodily well-being, and integrity, as
well as to concerns over reproduction, whether biological or social.
In that regard, objects give us the certainty of a definitive
cause for all our troubles it's because of plastic, it's because of the
plastic boys, it's because of this that we cannot live our lives fully as an
ethnic group, as a nation, and so on. Something very similar, in fact,
happens with the homosexual body. These objects, I argue in this book, enable a
certain kind of displacement of meanings, but also of sentiments, anxieties, and
desires, from a very diverse set of contexts, where they often have very legitimate
reason to exist, particularly where opportunities of work and social
reproduction have shrunk. Yet while these anxieties are very legitimate, their
projection upon objects, whether it's plastic or the homosexual or the
immigrant, can be very problematic. This is, in a way, how I think contemporary
politics works, and therefore we do need to pay attention to these forms of
displacement.
When you have a sexuality politics that only looks at what it
names; when we say we're studying sexuality or we're activists of sexuality and
all we care about is sexual identification and sexual expression; we miss out
on how sexuality ends up taking on anxieties, concerns and desires that have
nothing to do with sex or sexual identity at all. Rather, they belong to other
domains like work, reproduction and consumption sovereignty.
AM: Could you tell us about your fieldwork and how you try to
make sense of the objects you encounter? What methodologies do you prefer when
trying to account for the role of commodification in the routes of violence and
displacement?
GPM: I think that my methodologies
over the years have become messier and messier. I am doing things that I would
never advise my graduate students to do because it is, in a way, messy. I do
find myself more and more in need to embrace messiness in order to decentre
certain discourses. A proper methodology about sexuality would be to do some
participant observation such as interviews – to talk to people about sexuality.
What I'm doing is a bit different in the sense that, in order
to understand what sexuality politics is about or what the commodification of
sexuality is all about, you need to look elsewhere. You need to leave sexuality
aside and look at the places in which its effects or, or conditions of
possibility emerge. I am studying homophobia, but I am putting homophobia on
hold, and I'm going and looking at what plastic signifies before I can connect
it back. I call these ethnographic detours with other anthropologists who have
written them in a similar vein.
These kinds of methodologies pursue ethnographic detours. In
other words, rather than look straight on at the subject that we claim to
observe, and only engage with the literatures pertaining to that subject or
take that subject very literally, I am trying to walk in circles around that
subject in order to see how its effects or conditions of possibility emerge or
register beyond it. To be a scholar or an anthropologist of sexuality, I have
to actually pay attention to labor and economic value. I have to pay attention
to questions of ethnicity and autochthony. I have to pay attention to questions
of commodity production and consumption. In other words, you have to be
everywhere and nowhere.
AM: Your most recent publication On Hate, its Objects, and
the Poetics of Sexuality juxtaposes the Romanian and the Kenyan cases of
highly mediatization panics over sexuality. You argue that one of the reasons of
defending the “family values from the foreign plight” is determined by “a late
capitalist political economy when sexuality—its politics and poetics—plays out
in uncannily similar ways across the world” and creates “an interplay between
globally circulating grammars of identity” that are able to resonate with
inherited historical anxieties. What creates the objects of hate in these
cases? Could you expand on such patterns of panic?
GMP: I think I can try to distil
two patterns, maybe through an example or two, to help. Because one of the key
issues of this modularity of objects of hate, whether we talk about the
immigrant, whether we talk about the sexual other, whether we talk about
various forms of sexualized indigenous people or racialized others and so on, there
is something quite similar happening across the globe.
For instance, the fact that Russia has anti-LGBTQ politics
and the fact that previously Bolsonaro's Brazil had similar politics, those
things resonate with one another. You cannot say that these are separate
places, separate cultures –we live in a global world. We recognize the enemy,
as it were, by virtue of its appearance everywhere. But what I am arguing as an
anthropologist is that we cannot stop there. The work that this does in every
place is really important to pay attention to. One interesting example was a
few years ago when radical right protesters in Brazil, for example, protesting
for family values, anti-LGBTQ policies, or against what they call “gender
ideology”. Any discourse or film or culture production associated with gender
and sexual diversity was depicted as somehow threatening to the fabric of a
nation or a culture.
When these protesters gathered in Rio in front of a venue
where queer and feminist theorist Judith Butler was to give a talk, they produced
an effigy of Judith Butler dressed as a witch and set it on fire as though to cleanse,
as it were, the nation state of the plight of “gender ideology”. To me, what
happened there of course is scary, but if you take a deep breath and try to analyse
ethnographically what is going on there, it gives you a sense of the quite
complex grammars through which this sort of sexuality politics and ethno-nationalism
plays out.
There is a growing sense of ambiguity and uncertainty around
the center. I argue in my book Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and
Citizenship in Kenya that you do not need to be queer for elements of your
life to already have been deeply non-normativ
33 min
August 26, 2024 Off White - Anikó Imre and James Mark on Eastern Europe in the Global History of Race
In this conversation, Anikó Imre and James
Mark – co-editors, with Catherine Baker and Bogdan Iacob, of the new volume Off White. Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race – present the ambiguities of East Europeans’ whiteness and
the major implications such ambiguities have had; analyze how the “two halves of Europe” compare when it comes to questions of white supremacy; explicate
what their historical approach to nation building in Eastern Europe has yielded; discuss the place and role of East Europeans in global rightist networks today; and reflect on how they see their own role as mediators between political cultures and different scholarly traditions.
Anikó Imre is a Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.
James Mark is a Professor of History at the University of Exeter.
Off White. Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race has been edited by Catherine Baker, Bogdan Iacob, Anikó Imre, and James Mark. It is published by Manchester University Press.
44 min

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