scholarly journals From Replacement Migrations to the “Great Replacement”: Demographic Reproduction and National Populism in Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 671-685
Author(s):  
Andreu Domingo
Keyword(s):  
International Migration ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Population Ageing ◽  
First Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Demographic Evolution ◽  
Populist Movements ◽  
National Populism

This article aims to analyse how the distorted story about demographic evolution—demographic reproduction and its relationship with social stratification—is becoming substantial enough to erode democracy. In order to demonstrate this, it first analyses the origin of the “Great Replacement” metaphor that is used to refer to international migration, inside and outside the discipline of demography, as part of an allegory referring to demographic transformations in the twenty-first century, together with the metaphors “demographic winter” (referring to population ageing), and “demographic suicide” (when speaking of declining fertility). Second, it relates these three metaphors with right-wing national populist movements and explains how they have developed as conspiracy theories.

Intertextualities in Elfriede Jelinek’s Rein Gold: Ein Bühnenessay

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-133
Author(s):  
Britta Kallin
Keyword(s):  
Hate Crime ◽  
First Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Communist Manifesto ◽  
German Identity ◽  
Ethnic Germans ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ring Cycle ◽  
Twenty First Century

Elfriede Jelinek’s postdramatic stage essay Rein Gold (2012) interweaves countless texts including Richard Wagner’s operas from the Ring cycle, Karl Marx’s The Capital, and Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto as well as contemporary writings and news articles. Scholarship has so far examined the play in comparison to Wagner’s Rheingold opera, which serves as the base for the dialogue between the father Wotan and daughter Brünnhilde. This article examines intertextualities with the story of the National Socialist Underground, an extremist right-wing group that committed hate-crime murders and bank robberies, and with the exploitative history of workers, particularly women, in capitalist systems. Jelinek compares the National Socialist Underground’s attempt to violently rid Germany of non-ethnic Germans with Siegfried’s mythical fight as dragon slayer in the Nibelungenlied that created a hero who has been cast as a German identity figure for an ethnonational narrative and fascist ideas in twenty-first-century Germany.

Gothic Comedy

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-202
Author(s):  
Catherine Spooner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
Significant Function ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
The Family ◽  
Twenty First Century

Comedy has become an increasingly prevalent feature of Gothic in the twenty-first century, and thus Gothic comedy can be found across a multitude of media. This chapter surveys the kinds of comedy that appear in contemporary Gothic (such as sitcom, stand-up, romantic comedy, mock-documentary) and argues that, in the twenty-first century, Gothic comedy often functions to travesty culturally significant concepts of family, domesticity and childhood in the light of a liberal identity politics. Beginning with twentieth-century precedents such as television sitcom The Addams Family (1964–6) and Edward Gorey’s illustrations, the chapter analyses a range of contemporary texts including The League of Gentlemen (1999–2017), Corpse Bride (2005), Ruby Gloom (2006–8),Hotel Transylvania (2012) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014). It concludes that far from being frivolous or disposable, contemporary Gothic comedy forms a politically significant function in its tendency to undermine right-wing ideologies of the family and promote a celebratory politics of difference and inclusion.

Re-measuring Twenty-first Century Population Ageing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergei Scherbov ◽  
Warren C. Sanderson
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Natural Generalization ◽  
Population Ageing ◽  
First Century ◽  
Greek City ◽  
Study Population ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The One

Probably the most famous demographic riddle of all time is the one that the Sphinx was said to have posed to travellers outside the Greek city of Thebes: ‘Which creature walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?’ Unfortunate travellers who could not answer the riddle correctly were immediately devoured. Oedipus, fresh from killing his father, was the first to have got the answer right. The correct answer was ‘humans’. People crawl on their hands and knees as infants, walk on two feet in adulthood, and walk with a cane in old age. We easily recognize the three ages of humans. Humans are born dependent on the care of others. As they grow, their capacities and productivities generally increase, but eventually these reach a peak. After a while, capacities and productivities decline and, eventually, if they are lucky enough to survive, people become elderly, often again requiring transfers and care from others. The human life cycle is the basis of all studies of population ageing, and so we cannot begin to study population ageing without first answering the Sphinx’s riddle. However, answering the Sphinx’s riddle is not enough to get us started on a study of population ageing. We must take two more steps before we begin. First, we must recognize that not all people age at the same rate. As seen in Chapter 5, nowadays more educated people tend to have longer life expectancies than less educated people. Second, we must realize that there is no natural generalization of the Sphinx’s riddle to whole populations. Populations cannot be categorized into the stages of infancy, adulthood, and old age. Indeed, if the Sphinx was reborn today, we might find her sitting near another city and posing an equally perplexing riddle, one especially relevant for our times: ‘What can grow younger as it grows older?’ Answering this riddle correctly is the central challenge of this chapter and the key to understanding population ageing in the twenty-first century.

How War Makes (and Unmakes) the Democratic State

2021 ◽  
pp. 278-295
Author(s):  
Aziz Z. Huq
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
National Culture ◽  
September 11 ◽  
First Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Marin County ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
September 11 Attacks ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Greek Island

Focusing on the figures of the terrorist and the migrant, Huq suggests that war in the twenty-first century, in partial contrast to its precursors, may prove costly to democracy. Whereas war once served to develop bureaucratic capacity, shrink wealth gaps, and expand the franchise, it is less likely to perform these functions in a period when war is increasingly cabined to distant zones of violence, mechanized, and privatized. Huq considers a pair of novels by Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West. The former documents the transformation, and potential radicalization, of a young Pakistani professional in the wake of the September 11 attacks; the latter follows a couple from an unspecified city on the brink of civil war to the Greek island of Mykonos, then to London, and finally to Marin County, California, where their relationship dissolves. Whereas right-wing populists cast the terrorist and the migrant as racialized threats to civilization and national culture, Hamid’s protagonists instead embody a commitment to pluralism, inclusion, and democratic openness.

scholarly journals Obamageddon: Fear, the Far Right, and the Rise of “Doomsday” Prepping in Obama's America

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL F. MILLS
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Extreme Right ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Far Right ◽  
American Conservatism ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article examines the politics of American “doomsday” prepping during Barack Obama's presidency. It challenges claims that growing interest in prepping post-2008 arose exclusively from extreme apocalyptic, white supremacist, and anti-government reactions to Obama's electoral successes – claims that suggest prepping to be politically congruent with previous waves of extreme right-wing American “survivalism.” Drawing on ethnography, this paper argues that, while fears of Obama have been central to many preppers’ activities, much of their prepping under his presidency centred on fears that sit outside survivalist politics. Building on this, the article illuminates connections between prepping and America's twenty-first-century electoral mainstream. Engaging with discussions about the “remaking” of American conservatism during Obama's presidency, it particularly frames prepping's growth as being engaged with, and shaped by, currents of mainstream anti-Obama fear that similarly undergirded the Tea Party's rise within popular Republicanism at this time.

scholarly journals New Approaches to the Conceptualization and Measurement of Age and Ageing

2020 ◽  
pp. 243-258
Author(s):  
Sergei Scherbov ◽  
Warren C. Sanderson
Keyword(s):  
Population Ageing ◽  
First Century ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Statistical Measures ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
New View

Abstract People’s views on population ageing are influenced by the statistics that they read about it. The statistical measures in common use today were first developed around a century ago, in a very different demographic environment. For around two decades, we have been studying population ageing and have been arguing that its conventional portrayal is misleading. In this chapter, we summarize some of that research, which provides an alternative picture of population ageing, one that is more appropriate for twenty-first century. More details about our new view of population ageing can be found in. (Sanderson and Scherbov 2019). Population ageing can be measured in different ways. An example of this can found in the UN’s Profiles in Ageing, 2017. One way is to report on the forecasted increase in the number of people 60+ years old in the world.

scholarly journals Neoliberalism's Frankenstein: Authoritarian Freedom in Twenty-First Century “Democracies”

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-79
Author(s):  
Wendy Brown
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Illiberal Democracy ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract What peculiar form of freedom is cultivated and promised in right-wing political formations today? How does “illiberal democracy” sew together libertarianism and authoritarianism? How is the radical disinhibition and aggressiveness contained in these formations reconciled with their claim to cultivate traditional values and restore order? This paper reflects on the complex recent histories—of neoliberalism, of nihilism, and of what Marcuse termed “repressive desublimation”—that generate the force and legitimacy of this novel development in Euro-Atlantic political life.

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