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This book analyzes key popular culture artifacts linked with United States' far-right extremism to illustrate how extremists use various narrative strategies to legitimate their interests and goals and to justify violent actions. Recognizing these narrative strategies and how they are used partly explains the back and forth moves between mainstream politics and the far-right of ideas and issues that used to remain within far-right circles. The main objective of this book is to utilize theoretical approaches that centralize processes of racialization to analyze and explain how far-right extremists utilize recognizable narratives to mainstream and communicate their ideas. The book will illustrate processes by which racialized subjects are produced and violence justified. In order to do so, the book concentrates on popular culture as sources of how the far-right constitutes their identities and goals. It first develops a methodological plan to study popular culture artifacts that is drawn from scholarship on race and discourse analysis in International Relations (IR). It then analyzes far-right use of key popular culture artifacts, such as magazines, memes, and manifestos, to note how extremist identities and interests are produced, publicly communicated, and mainstreamed. This will contribute to Security Studies and IR's understanding of far-right extremism, especially how they utilize similar narrative strategies as used in mainstream contexts to justify their calls for violence.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Far-right extremism: The United States and the world.- Chapter 2: Race, International Relations, white supremacy, and methodology.- Chapter 3: Whiteness, white supremacy, and far-right extremism in the United States.- Chapter 4: American Renaissance and far-right extremists' use of numbers and pseudoscience for legitimation of violence.- Chapter 5: Meme-ing the far-right: Pepe and the deplorables.- Chapter 6: Red pills, white genocide and "the great replacement": Re-writing history, and constructing white victimhood in/through far-right extremist manifestos and texts.- Chapter 7: Far-right extremism and strategies of legitimation and resistance in US politics.
About the author
Priya Dixit is Associate Professor of Politics in the Political Science Department at Virginia Tech University, USA.
