This talk seeks to contribute to a global understanding of reactionary discursive formations at the current historical conjuncture, foregrounding the centrality of global whiteness, masculinism, and a renewed imagination of “the West” as well as gendered East/West binaries. This entails not only attending to the operation of reactionary sensibilities, tropes, and memes in “non-white” and “non-Western” geographies, but also examining the particular imaginaries of the global integral to their operation in both the West and the Global Easts. I first illuminate global and civilizational imaginaries integral to the resurgence of authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, and social conservativism across diverse settings. I then scrutinize the workings of global racial entanglements, masculinism, and gendered East/West binaries in Chinese anti-baizuo discourse, encompassing both techno-nationalist communities on social media and self-styled “Trumpist” intellectuals critical of the Chinese regime. While they both reproduce the far right metanarrative about the “Western civilization”, imagined to be racially pure and socio-politically masculine in the past, being threatened by ethnocultural diversity and an emasculating political culture, they incorporate these representations within different ideological constellations and positionings in relation to global whiteness and liberal hegemony. The talk contributes to the growing literature elucidating that reactionary counter-movements to liberal orders emerge within rather than against liberal and neoliberal structures.
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Chenchen Zhang is Assistant Professor in International Relations at Durham University. Her work has appeared in journals such as Review of International Studies, Geoforum, European Journal of International Relations, and Critical Asian Studies. She is a co-editor of Geopolitics and co-host of the Shicha podcast. Website: https://chenchenzhang.net/. X: @chenchenzh.
This webinar will be moderated by Cas Mudde.
The Global Perspectives on the Far Right webinar series
The webinar series Global Perspectives on the Far Right is hosted by C-REX and takes place every quarter in 2023. The webinars last for one hour from 15:00-16:00 CET, unless indicated otherwise due to the speakers’ time zone differences. This webinar series is a continuation from February 2021.
The regions covered are largely inspired by the new Manchester University Press book series, ‘Global Studies of the Far Right’, by founding co-editor and C-REX affiliate Eviane Leidig.
The webinar will have one short presentation followed by a Q&A session, moderated by Cas Mudde or Eviane Leidig.
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