Search

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to underscore postcolonial approaches that undercut racial inequities as they foster racial equality and inclusivity at higher institutions of learning, especially in racialised spaces in South Africa.Design/methodology/approachThis article dwells on whistleblowing as a channel of demythologising Whiteness in South African universities. While the #RhodesMustFall movement at University of Cape Town enjoyed much critical attention, concurrent movements in other universities such as Open Stellenbosch movement did not. This could be attributable to the methods used, especially whistleblowing, an unorthodox method employed to radically question university symbols, to disrupt racial superiority. In revisiting the movement's campaigns, the article specifically highlights Kylie Thomas' whistleblowing to underscore the role of humanities in fostering social transformation beginning with spaces of knowledge production such as universities.FindingsThe research found that challenging apartheid murals and monuments on South African institutions of higher learning required aggressive but creative approaches. This called for unmasking foundations of White supremacism. Whistle blowing and activism against White supremacism boldly confronted apartheid legacies that appear to be well preserved.Research limitations/implicationsThe research is limited to the 2015 South African student movements. The emphasis is on Open Stellenbosch movement which has received lesser critical attention compared to #RhodesMustFall. It envisions equality, diversity and inclusion in learning institutions which is achievable only through robust activist approaches to institutional/systemic racism in the institutions, rather than armchair theorising.Originality/valueThis article examines ways in which unorthodox methods such as whistlelowing and activism work to disrupt regimented White supremacism in an institution of higher learning founded on racist ethos.

Fear of transnational terrorism, along with a revitalization of sectarian nationalism, is sundering social and political consensus across the world. Can psychology help? The focus of this review is on the psychological and related social factors that instigate and sustain violent extremism and polarizing group conflict. I first describe the changing global landscape of transnational terrorism, encompassing mainly violent Islamist revivalism and resurgent racial and ethnic supremacism. Next, I explore the psychosocial nature of the devoted actor and rational actor frameworks, focusing on how sacred values, identity fusion, and social network dynamics motivate and maintain extreme violence. The psychology of the will to fight and die is illustrated in behavioral and brain studies with frontline combatants in Iraq, militant supporters in Morocco, and radicalizing populations in Spain. This is followed by a consideration of how to deal with value-driven conflicts and a discussion of how the Internet and social media encourage the propagation of polarized conflict.

Dylann S. Roof, white supremacist perpetrator of the Charleston massacre (2015) resolved to dismiss his lawyers and to represent himself. In the course of the proceedings he wrote extensively, keep...

This chapter commences with an in-depth exploration of the way the concrete computations of AI become entrained with unfairness and neoliberal politics. It will traverse from the operations of loss functions and optimisers at a tensor level to the ensuing discrimination, social ranking and administrative violence, making visible the ways in which AI becomes productive of both supremacism and the means by which to enact it. The second half of the chapter will propose ways in which machine learning can be reclaimed for the purposes of non-fascist living. Looking to a post-AI politics, the text challenges representationalism via Barad’s agential realism and puts forward a practical recomposition based on people’s and workers councils. The aim is to transform the character of AI from paranoid targeting to prefigurative relationality.

4chan.org is a popular imageboard Web site based on an unrivalled culture of anonymity. In the past, 4chan has often gained the public spotlight for its role in harbouring alt-right extremism, antisemitism and white supremacism, particularly within the controversial board /pol/, a forum dedicated to political discussions with over 140,000 posts per day and millions of unique monthly users globally. In response to a growing interest in online communication on climate change, this paper applies automated content analysis through probabilistic topic modelling to analyse how the online discourse around climate change has evolved on this platform over a five-year period between 2015 and 2019. Analysing a sample of 216,525 /pol/ posts, this study finds that, despite its reputation as a platform dominated by hate speech, discussions on climate change among /pol/ users remain primarily based on scientific content. However, this appears to be on a reversing trend, as discussions on race and nationalism are steadily overtaking scientific narratives. This paper also finds that a specific type of nationalism, labelled as climate nationalism is on the rise on this platform. Lastly, this study shows that interest in the status of scientific consensus on climate change, often considered a staple of discussions on climate change, is progressively falling in relevance.

The Internet imageboard 4chan is often believed to be a hub of fascism, white supremacism, and violent misogyny. The popular press associates 4chan with ‘incels’ (involuntarily celibate men), using the site to vent their rage at women. Yet a significant minority of posters on the site are female, and/or present themselves as such. These posters use various strategies to negotiate a space for identity-construction and to build subcultural capital within an antifeminist Web space, a striking development in what Amy Shields Dobson calls the process of ‘getting by’ in postfeminist neoliberal culture. By quantifying and analysing these strategies, whilst restraining the rush to ethical judgement typical to discussion of 4chan, this study aims to resituate 4chan’s feminine users from passive objects of violence to active participants in the site’s culture and influence.

This article examines the relationship between becoming disillusioned with racist ideas and/or groups and the decision to leave organize white supremacism. We explore a classical sociological puzzl...

Chocolate Cities is a work of Black urban studies, treating the entire US as a variegated “South.” Despite regional differences the US retains its endemic white supremacism. Based on this recogniti...

The murder of the German politician Walter Lübcke in 2019 by a far-right extremist with links to Neo-Nazi groups exposes the need to address European ethnonationalist extremism from a wider array of approaches, one of them, the religious one. European ethno-nationalists have found profitable the distortion of elements of Western Christianity and its use to reject individuals they consider undesirable, especially Muslims and non-European immigrants. By doing this, far-right extremists have managed to consolidate an ideological basis known as Christianism. This work examines the characteristics of the extremist ideology Christianism and its relation to white supremacism, as well as the historical bias of the Crusades they use and that is a central part of their ideology. This work analyses the manifesto written by white supremacist terrorist Brenton Tarrant with the aim to expose the relation between white supremacism and Christianism, as well as the influence on terrorist acts against non-Europeans in the West, and the main propositions of such extremist ideology. The conclusion proposes the need of better education in history and critical thinking skills in societies affected by white supremacism, as well as the participation of followers of traditional Christianity in counter extremism efforts

Early defenders of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights invoked species hierarchy: human beings are owed rights because of our discontinuity with and superiority to animals. Subsequent defenders avoided species supremacism, appealing instead to conditions of embodied subjectivity and corporeal vulnerability we share with animals. In the past decade, however, supremacism has returned in work of the new ‘dignitarians’ who argue that human rights are grounded in dignity, and that human dignity requires according humans a higher status than animals. Against the dignitarians, I argue that defending human rights on the backs of animals is philosophically suspect and politically self-defeating.

This chapter sets efforts to research race in the (post-)Yugoslav region in the context of what Kimberle Crenshaw has termed today’s ‘post-post-racial’ times, in which progressives who might have believed that global society was on an inevitable course towards overcoming racism have now had to confront its open resurgence. From the perspectives of Crenshaw and other critical race scholars whose work has opened up new possibilities to understand south-east Europe within the global politics of race, however, the persistence of structural racism as a historical legacy of colonialism and the enslavement of Africans means that the ‘post-racial’ moment was already an illusion. Movements to ‘decolonise the university’ and its knowledge production, which have significantly influenced my own working environment as a white anglophone scholar of south-east Europe in the UK, share this structural perspective. The chapter explains the significance of these movements, and struggles in related disciplines to confront sympathies with white supremacism, for researching race after Yugoslavia in a moment where Islamophobic narratives justifying violence against Muslims in the region have become points of identification for the far right worldwide.

In 1937, just as South Africa was closing its borders to German-Jewish refugees, Anne Fischer (1914-1986) arrived on Cape Town’s docks with little more to her name than her camera. Having escaped a fascist political system in which similar issues of violence and state-enforced segregation were in play, Fischer was uniquely poised to document the fundamental changes that would come to define South Africa in the decade leading up to the advent of apartheid. In addition to exploring how her gendered experiences of exile informed, and in many ways dictated, the possibilities of her photographic practice in her new colonial context, this chapter begins to chronicle the itinerant photographic careers of her similarly exiled and equally obscured Weimar women colleagues in Cape Town - namely, those of Else Hausmann (n.d.-1971) and Etel Mittag-Fodor (1905-2005). Despite sharing somewhat similar backgrounds, each of these women’s oeuvres is as distinct as their dispositions. Examining their lives and archives in relation to one another affords an opportunity to take into account their divergent relationships with their shared medium and, in so doing, challenges essentialisms that continue to pervade discussions of women’s photographic work. Ultimately, this chapter works to shed light on three of South Africa’s underexposed female photographers and begins to situate Fischer’s early documentary work within the social, historical and political context in which it was produced - one marked by rising white supremacism, heightened antisemitism and the increased realisation of the boundaries that circumscribed the New Woman.

In the early 1960s, the American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell was invited by neo-Nazi groups in Australia and Britain to come to their respective countries. On both occasions, the minister for immigration in Australia and the home secretary in Britain sought to deny Rockwell entry to the country on the grounds that he was not conducive to the public good and threatened disorder. This was done using the border control and visa system that existed in both countries, which allowed the government to exclude from entry certain individuals that were proponents of extreme or &ldquo, dangerous&rdquo, political ideologies. In the post-war period, explicit neo-Nazism was seen as a dangerous ideology and was grounds for exclusion of foreigners, even though domestic political parties espousing the same ideology were allowed to exist. Rockwell never came to Australia, but illicitly entered Britain via Ireland in 1962 before being deported, which highlighted potential problems for the British controlling passage across the Irish Sea. Rockwell&rsquo, s exclusion and deportation also became a touchpoint for future debates in British politics about the denial of entry and deportation of political figures. This article reveals that the Australian and British governments, while allowing far-right organisations to lawfully exist in their countries, also sought to ban the entry of foreign actors who espoused similar politics. This was due to concerns about potential public disorder and violence, but also allowed both governments to portray white supremacism and racial violence as foreign to their own countries.

This chapter compares contemporary far-right movements in Australia with far-right movements from the 1930s. By examining the provenance and manifestations of the far right in these periods, the chapter notes the importance of Australia’s early history, especially with regard to the “White Australia Policy” that contributed to a rejection of Australia’s Indigenous population as well as non-white immigration. Movements from both eras, apart from their resurgence during times of apparent or feared economic decline, are shown to exhibit similar characteristics in adherence to a nativist populism, hybrid racism, ambivalence to democracy, and congruence with transnational far-right movements. The chapter concludes that as late as 2019 the ruling coalition government in Australia gained from a politically expedient electoral relationship with a xenophobic far right with roots in earlier far-right movements.

The first written translations from South African indigenous languages were produced by travelling European naturalists in the period of Dutch colonial rule. This translational contact between European science systems and Khoekhoe segmented society expressed Western supremacism and processes of so-called intellectual subjugation. Translation was a form of knowledge extraction and echoed material forms of colonial extraction. In terms of SST, translation was part of European societies’ groping into the environment and facilitated the reduction of environmental complexity while simultaneously drawing a distinction between systemic and environmental characteristics according to degrees of civilisation. Translation possessed a “referential” purpose rather than a directly communicative purpose, since its meaning lay in what it expressed concerning indigenous peoples rather than in the propositional meaning of translated words.

International audience; The fight against extremist narratives on the Internet and on social networks has become a priority the fight against terrorism and radical recruitment. Our elected representatives and authorities seem to believe in the effectiveness if a simple, sharp approach. However, from a scientific point of view, the situation is not so simple and therefore, measures must not be hurried. While it may be rather easy to characterize a coherent, repetitive and identifiable narratives, radical terrorist narratives are nonetheless a very complex linguistic and sociolinguistic issue. Moreover, they are based on complex dissemination modes and communicational structures. For the purpose of a French research project (ANR: Défense) we analysed the public declarations of extreme right-wing activist groups in order to gather and characterize their narratives from an interdisciplinary perspective (in the light of various disciplines such as sociology, political science, linguistics, sociolinguistics, and communication science). Then, we elaborated a mathematical and algorithmic model in order to automatise searches for warning purposes. This model also responds to the sociological purpose of identification and validation, which can be used by digital content creators and internet providers.; La lutte contre les récits extrémistes sur Internet et sur les réseaux sociaux est devenue une priorité : la lutte contre le terrorisme et le recrutement radical. Nos élus et autorités semblent croire à l'efficacité d'une approche simple et pointue. Cependant, d'un point de vue scientifique, la situation n'est pas aussi simple et il ne faut donc pas précipiter les mesures. S'il peut être assez facile de caractériser un récit cohérent, répétitif et identifiable, les récits terroristes radicaux n'en constituent pas moins une question linguistique et sociolinguistique très complexe. En outre, ils reposent sur des modes de diffusion et des structures de communication complexes. Dans le cadre d'un projet de recherche français (ANR : Défense), nous avons analysé les déclarations publiques de groupes militants d'extrême droite afin de rassembler et de caractériser leurs récits dans une perspective interdisciplinaire (à la lumière de diverses disciplines telles que la sociologie, les sciences politiques, la linguistique, la sociolinguistique et les sciences de la communication). Ensuite, nous avons élaboré un modèle mathématique et algorithmique afin d'automatiser les recherches à des fins d'alerte. Ce modèle répond également à l'objectif sociologique d'identification et de validation, qui peut être utilisé par les créateurs de contenu numérique et les fournisseurs d'accès à Internet.

The chapter draws a theoretical outline of socio-economic structures leading to opposing forms of nationalisms across regions and also addresses central theoretical concerns of left-wing politics in underdeveloped countries. It outlines three fundamental forms of nationalisms, namely, secular liberal form grounded on modern industrial transformation of society purely under the tutelage of industrial bourgeoisie, ethno-religious supremacism which characterises underdeveloped regions in general and thirdly the syntheses of the two opposing forms primarily leading to fascism. In this light the concept of hegemony is disaggregated into cultural and political hegemony to demonstrate the presence and absence of a dialectical relationship between the two phenomena in different historical contexts. Its presence characterises in general the politico-ideological superstructure of advanced capitalism and absence portrays that of underdeveloped regions.

This paper suggests ways to examine the American Alt-Right as a community of discourse. It relies on Michel Foucault’s notion that discourse is marked by external procedures of prohibition, division and will to truth, and it shows how the Alt-Right owes its powerful emergence in the public sphere to these procedures. It concludes with a brief recall that internal procedures also shape a community of discourse, by giving its actors access to commentary, providing the community with a sense of shared authorship and leading to a “fellowship” of discourse. This paper was researched and written before the Charlottesville fracas (12 August 2017) that propelled the Alt-Right into the limelight, and further obscured its discursive construction.

This paper seeks to explain the extraordinary violence of modern-day organized white supremacism in the United States. We begin on a conceptual level by distinguishing the racial ideologies and violence associated with modern racist movements from the racism and racial violence expressed in daily life in highly racialized and racially unequal societies. We then move to an empirical level by using our interviews with a broad set of former racist activists to explore how violence is caused by—and also can cause—the vicious racist ideologies of modern white supremacism. Cet article cherche à expliquer la violence extraordinaire du suprémacisme blanc moderne organisé aux États-Unis. Il aborde en premier lieu l’aspect conceptuel en distinguant les idéologies raciales et la violence associée aux mouvements racistes modernes du racisme et de la violence raciale exprimés au quotidien dans des sociétés fortement racialisées et racialement inégalitaires. Nous nous déplaçons ensuite vers un point de vue empirique en utilisant nos entretiens avec un large ensemble d’anciens activistes racistes pour explorer comment la violence est causée par – et peut aussi causer – les tortueuses idéologies racistes du suprémacisme blanc moderne.

The white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 was one of the largest to occur in the United States during recent decades, and mirrored the severe social and racial conflic...

Charlottesville is a city in Virginia of just over 48,000 people, formed as an act of assembly in 1762. It is home to the University of Virginia designed by Thomas Jefferson and gateway to Shenando...

This article examines the rise and key characteristics of Neo-Zionist political thought in Israel and its relationship with mainstream Zionist thought. It argues that despite the radical and repulsive discourses of Neo-Zionism and the critique expressed by liberal Zionists towards it, the former has always been embodied in classical Zionism. The justifications provided by Neo-Zionists are based on principles propagated by central leaders of mainstream Zionism. Utilising new perspectives in Settler-Colonial Studies, the article demonstrates how both strands encapsulate the Zionist continuum and continuous expansionist drive for new settlements in Palestine based on ‘Biblical right’ of Jews over the land of Palestine. Both advocate supremacist, exclusivist, and volkish rights for Jews with disastrous consequences for the indigenous people of Palestine. The convictions and practices of the Neo-Zionists in the post 1967 period help unveil the camouflaged motivations, justifications and practices of mainstream expansionist Zionism.

Scholars of white supremacism adopted the framework of social movement research later and less completely than did scholars of progressive movements. Although the shift to considering racist groups as a social movement had many analytic benefits, it also nudged analysis away from some of the most central aspects of white supremacism. This article suggests how social movement research and scholarship on organized racism can benefit from a more reflective engagement with each other.

In the wake of several political and social developments across the globe, where majoritarianism and supremacism are fast gaining ground by popular mandate, the fraught relationship between religio...

This article, the first detailed scholarly assessment of northern responses to the death of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis in December 1889, contributes to ongoing academic debates over the troubled process of sectional reconciliation after the Civil War. Southern whites used their leader's funeral obsequies to assert not only their affection for the deceased but also their devotion to the Lost Cause that he had championed and embodied. Based on an analysis of northern newspapers and mass-circulation magazines in the two weeks after Davis's death, the essay demonstrates that many northerners, principally Republican politicians and editors, Union veterans, and African Americans, were outraged by southerners’ flagrant willingness to laud a man whom they regarded as the arch-traitor and that they remained opposed to reconciliation on southern terms. However, despite continuing concerns about public displays of affection for the Confederacy evident at the time of Davis's reinterment in Richmond in May 1893, northern opposition to the Lost Cause waned rapidly in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Full-blown sectional reconciliation occurred after the Republicans gave up on their efforts to enforce black voting rights in the South and President William McKinley's imperialist foreign policy necessitated, and to some degree garnered, support from southern whites. The death of Jefferson Davis, therefore, can be seen as an important event in the difficult transition from a heavily sectionalized postwar polity to a North-South rapprochement based heavily on political pragmatism, sentiment, nationalism, and white supremacism.

Japan’s importation of geopolitics can be divided into two periods: 1925 to the mid-1930s and the mid-1930s to 1945. This chapter examines the former period, when geopolitics was imported but not widely accepted. The first application of German geopolitics refuted the white supremacism in the Pacific region. Although this first appreciation attracted but a few followers, it was the interpretation in this period that set the orientation of Japanese geopolitics, in which geographical determinism was transformed into ecological fatalism. With this conception, Japanese geopoliticians argued that there had been a different world order from Europe in the Pacific region. In this chapter, it is also demonstrated that even in European geopolitics, there had been continuous mutations of the theory of the state as a living organism.

Following the great fragmentation in the Arab world today, as well as the problematic de-colonization phase, it would be relevant to investigate whether Arab-Islamic Egyptian revivalism has been truly capable of shaping a counter-hegemonic narrative against Western colonialism and post-colonialism in the twentieth century. Can we consider Sayyid Qutb's political and religious analysis, as well as his formative background, a concrete counter-hegemonic narrative? Was the narrative of Rashid Rida and Hasan al-Banna solidly based on religious Islamic concepts and meanings? The main aim of this article is to reconsider the contemporary understanding of Islamic Egyptian thought in relation to Buruma and Margalit's proposed Occidentalism methodology, on the one hand, and the hegemonic–counter-hegemonic debate, on the other.

In this essay, I read Mark Twain as a practitioner of what Deleuze and Guattari call an “active micropolitics,” focusing especially on his depictions of race and racism. In his popular stories, essays, speeches, and autobiography, Twain gave voice not only to marginal and underprivileged characters, but also to minoritarian, changeable sentiments circulating among popular majorities. Moreover, he suggested these sentiments might comprise not only actual counter-majorities, but also potential counter-majorities, linking personal complexity to democratic potential. I argue that despite his appreciation for the inertia of popular prejudice, Twain’s appeals to minoritarian sentiments, and the popularity thereof, testify against Tocqueville’s fatalism concerning majority opinion in general, and white supremacism in particular.

The main arguments of my lecture were how humans are failing themselves and devastating earth’s biosphere, at least in part, because they became uncooperative with two key ecological inheritances: raising the young within the human evolved developmental niche and, as part of this, facilitating the development of a deep attachment to, knowledge of and respect for their local landscape of other-than-human entities. Without humanity’s return to these cooperative evolutionary roots, the species will be doomed, along with many other-than-human beings. The now-widespread mental illness of ‘human supremacism’ that results from these missing pieces has spread around the planet and is destroying ecological integrity. The ‘Sacred Money and Markets’ story (SMM) that David Korten criticizes and I briefly discuss is a symptom of these missing pieces of human inheritance. We must return to a Sacred Life and Living Earth story with lifestyles to match.

This article considers a particular moment in world history when an instant of epoch-making triumph in the non-West – Japan's defeat of Russia in 1905 – coincided with a period of intense national anxiety in Britain in the wake of the South African War (1899–1902). One outcome of this historical intersection was the emergence in Britain of a euphoric ‘cult of Japan’ that saw many Edwardians, obsessed with the idea of ‘efficiency’, deploy Japan as both a referent for British shortcomings and a model for reform. The article asks why proponents of ‘efficiency’ – most of them ardent imperialists – deemed it acceptable, even strategically advantageous, in such domestic debates to draw upon examples from Japan – an ‘Oriental’ race and former protégé – in apparent contradiction of Western supremacism. The article contends that Britain's emulative attitudes were underpinned by an emergent plural conception of ‘civilization’, which appraised Japan's attainment of civilization as consistent with Western standards whilst at the same time recognizing elements of Japanese particularity – an outlook that justified reciprocal learning.

This article enquires into the articulation of Britishness, whiteness and indigeneity in post-Second World War British discourses of race, nationality, citizenship, and immigration. Noting how frequently, in contemporary European far right discourse, the “fantasy of a ‘return’ to socially homogeneous societies that existed ‘before’ cultural difference” (Pitcher 2009: 2) is underwritten by (factitious) claims of indigeneity that permit the equation of “labour migration” with “colonization” (Caldwell 2009: 7), I work to eviscerate the indigenism of the anti-immigration British right, which aligns white supremacism with anti-colonial political movements in ways that are or should be profoundly anathematic to the latter, without gutting the project of Indigenous rights altogether. To this end, the article reflects on the use Indigenous cultural workers, such as the Aboriginal activist-artist Burnum Burnum and Māori poet Robert Sullivan, have made of the trope of “reverse colonization,” building on their counterhistorical fictions to expose and unsettle the toxic spatial stories that continue to condition debates about race, national identity, citizenship and immigration in a 21st-century Britain normatively supposed to be post-imperial. RESUME Dans cet article, nous examinons l’articulation du britannicisme, de la blancheur et de l’autochtonie dans les discours sur la race, la nationalite, la citoyennete et l’immigration apres la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Nous faisons d’abord remarquer que les discours contemporains europeens font frequemment reference au « fantasme du “retour” vers des societes socialement homogenes qui existaient “avant” la difference culturelle » (Pitcher 2), un fantasme souscrit par de (fausses) allegations d’autochtonie rendant possibles l’equivalence des termes « migration de travail » et « colonisation » (Caldwell 7). Nous tâchons ainsi d’eviscerer l’autochtonisme de la droite britannique anti-immigration, qui aligne le supremacisme blanc aux mouvements politiques anticoloniaux par des moyens profondement anathematiques a ce dernier, sans toutefois completement supprimer les droits autochtones du projet. A cette fin, nous reflechissons au recours par les producteurs culturels autochtones, tels l’activiste et artiste Burnum Burnum et le poete māori Robert Sullivan, au procede de « colonisation inverse », qui s’appuie sur leurs fictions contrehistoriques pour exposer et a destabiliser les recits spatiaux toxiques qui continuent de circonscrire les discussions sur la race, l’identite nationale, la citoyennete et l’immigration, dans une Grande-Bretagne du XXIe siecle normativement postimperiale. KEYWORDS: Indigeneity; white supremacy; migration; borders; Britain; empire; Burnum Burnum; Robert Sullivan

We need to start looking at translational phenomena from an intensely self-reflexive and ethical-ideological viewpoint. We are caught in a (post-)neoliberal world order in which capitalist values become an ever more deeply engrained and unquestioned standard, an order of discourse the structures of domination and hegemony of which define global power relations, just as they permeate scholarly discourses. Promising research exists that questions the cultural hegemony of Anglophone value systems and their underlying positivist epistemologies. Important inroads have been made to uncover the intellectual roots of the epistemic threat which Anglophone discourse poses towards alternative forms of knowledge. These efforts question the epistemological and colonial roots of Anglophone supremacism, yet they do not venture into a more combative anti-neoliberal, in fact anti-imperialist, mode of reasoning. The missing piece in the jigsaw may be found in some strands of critical theory that question the socio-economic...

How did the rowdy crowds of Shakespeare’s time turn into the silent seated audiences we know today? This chapter describes the nineteenth century campaigns by western practitioners to retrain spectators into a new mode of quiet receptivity. By forcing audiences to pay attention differently, cultural commentators believed that they could forge a better society for everyone—and yet succeeded instead in widening social divisions. By examining a range of theories about the ‘aesthetic state’ and exploring the ‘culture and civilisation’ movement, this chapter demonstrates how the vision of audiences as quiet recipients of great art is imbricated in a history of white supremacism and anti-working-class prejudice.