The Strange Fruit of the Tree of Liberty: Lynch Law and Popular Sovereignty in the United States

Gorup, Michael

doi:10.1017/s1537592720001255

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…The engagement of these scholars with texts, legal documents, and policy, however, falls short of exploring the popular bases of imperial attachments, which a recent literature has newly highlighted. These contributions note that lynching as a form of spectacular group violence affirmed the whiteness of the sovereign people and the subordination of African Americans (Gorup 2020). They also explore how transnational solidarity and the adoption of the imperial discourse of racial superiority by the white working class in the British settler colonies served to constitute the people while excluding nonwhites already in these territories (Valdez 2021a).…”

Section: Popular Sovereignty Self-determination and Empirementioning

confidence: 99%

Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

Valdez¹

2022

Perspect. polit.

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This article develops W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of democratic despotism to illustrate the entanglement of popular sovereignty and empire through an excessive form of western self-determination and theorizes how features of this formation remain today. Democratic despotism implies that, in western democracies at the turn of the twentieth century, popular sovereignty was an impulse to partake of the wealth and resources obtained by empire. Western democracies issued a claim to determine themselves (democratically) and others (despotically), in what I call “self-and-other-determination.” I frame the question of imperial democracy within the literature on empire and racial capitalism and the writings of Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Saidiya Hartman to conceptualize how racial affective attachments allow citizens past and present to restrict democratic concern to a limited community, whose wealth relies on the imperial exploitation of racialized others. I discuss the absence of these questions in the literature on self-determination and reflect on the implications of my framework for the contemporary rise of right-wing populism.

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Section: Popular Sovereignty Self-determination and Empirementioning

confidence: 99%

Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

Valdez¹

2022

Perspect. polit.

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“…8 Laclau was aware of this asymmetry in his early work, wherein he opposed a "populism of the dominant classes" to a "populism of the dominated classes" (Laclau, 2012, p. 173). 9 There is, of course, a deep history of reactionary mass politics, ranging from fascism (Riley, 2010) to Jim Crow (Gorup, 2020). However, such political formations generally do not involve independent popular organizing.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…99There is, of course, a deep history of reactionary mass politics, ranging from fascism (Riley, 2010) to Jim Crow (Gorup, 2020). However, such political formations generally do not involve independent popular organizing.…”

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confidence: 99%

Populism, political organization, and the paradox of popular agency

Gorup

2021

Constellations

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The 2010s may well be remembered as the decade of "populism." On the left, this has entailed a welcome rediscovery of electoral politics-a terrain that had been comfortably monopolized by the neoliberal right and center for a generation. However, despite the palpable enthusiasm generated by some recent electoral victories, and the genuine advances made, it is by now apparent that the story of the past decade is predominantly one of disappointment for the left. Left-populism-from the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn to insurgent parties like Syriza and La France Insoumise -is now mostly an archive of defeat, with only Podemos, newly tamed by its coalition partners, continuing to claim any meaningful hold on power. Even if left populism exceeded the cynical expectations of its centrist critics, it also appears to have failed in providing a durable pathway to transformative change. Today, it is mostly rightpopulists-if one is willing to concede the semantic terrain-who continue to head governments around the globe, and to predictably disastrous effect.As often noted, the recent left-populist tide owes an important intellectual debt to the political thought of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Numerous parties and movements, including Syriza, Podemos, and La France Insoumise, have cited their work as a direct inspiration (Hancox, 2015). If we wish to understand the prospects and pitfalls of left populism today, it is with their theory that we must grapple. According to Laclau, the central task of radical politics is the construction of a people (Laclau, 2014, p. 139). As Jason Frank observes, this has typically been reduced to the question of popular identity-that is, "who the people are" (Frank, 2017, p. 629). Theorists have less frequently attended to the question of how this construction is to be undertaken: by what practices are the people to be enacted (Grattan, 2016)? In this article, I take up this latter question and offer a critical reassessment of left-populist theory in light of its recent practical shortcomings. As I show, to the extent that Laclau and Mouffe engage the question of popular enactment, they tend to invoke the charismatic leader-a figure uniquely positioned to actualize populism's political "logic"-as its appropriate medium. Though they have never been shy about the importance of leaders to their brand of populist politics (Jäger & Borriello, 2020, p. 743), this feature has not always been emphasized in interpretations of their work. As I show, in locating the power of popular enactment in a representative leader, the theory of left populism tends to neglect the terrain of organization (e.g., the associational bonds that tie a demos together), and this threatens to undermine the project's normative appeal and strategic viability. In response to these issues, I develop a theoretical account of political organization as a practice of people-making, drawing on Laclau and Mouffe's foremost intellectual predecessor, Antonio Gramsci. Populism, of course, is a vexed term-an essentia...

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“…94 While the democratic legitimacy of such a declaration is dubious, it is nonetheless a popular claim to authority, an attempt at "racialized people making" that provided closure in moments of contestation of the boundaries of the polity. 95 This instance of people-making, moreover, indexes the notion of popular sovereignty in two further ways. First, it highlights the transnational affinities of movements that enlisted states as protectors of white well-being in an early instance of "think global, act local."…”

Section: Racial Capitalism and Empire: Labor Mobility And Settlementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Socialism and Empire: Labor Mobility, Racial Capitalism, and the Political Theory of Migration

Valdez

2020

Political Theory

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This essay brings together political theories of empire and racial capitalism to clarify the entanglements between socialist and imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. I show that white labor activists and intellectuals in the United States and the British settler colonies borrowed from imperial scripts to mark non-white workers as a threat. This discourse was thus both imperial and popular, because it absorbed the white working class into settler projects and enlisted its support in defense of imperial logics of labor control. While white workers’ demands of enfranchisement were part of a transnational imagination that was both imperial and narrowly emancipatory, this discourse reemerged as one of popular sovereignty and found channels and paths to institutionalization through national states. These institutional formations arose out of the encounter between capitalists interested in facilitating mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe, elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding exploitable non-white workers. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of workers of color created segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with both capitalist goals of labor control and the protection of the settler status of emerging polities. Bringing to the forefront the imperial genealogy of popular sovereignty and immigration control disrupts liberal political theory frameworks that condemn restrictions as well as those that find migration restrictions permissible. The analysis also illuminates contemporary immigration politics.

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The Strange Fruit of the Tree of Liberty: Lynch Law and Popular Sovereignty in the United States

Cited by 7 publications

References 54 publications

Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

Populism, political organization, and the paradox of popular agency

Socialism and Empire: Labor Mobility, Racial Capitalism, and the Political Theory of Migration

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