Identitarian politics, precarious sovereignty

• Published in: Postmedieval a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 11; no. 4; pp. 371 - 383
• Main Author: Kao, Wan-Chuan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Palgrave Macmillan UK 01.12.2020; Palgrave Macmillan
• Subjects: Academic discourse; Cultural and Media Studies; Digital Humanities; Ethnicity; Globalization; Historiography; History of Medieval Europe; Ideology; Literature; Mainstreaming; Medieval Literature; Middle Ages; Politics; Postmodernism; Reduction (Phonological or Phonetic); White supremacy
• ISSN: 2040-5960; 2040-5979
• DOI: 10.1057/s41280-020-00202-8

This essay investigates the intersection among postmodern neomedievalism, environmental activism, and nostalgic Southern pastoralism in crafting the ideology of American white supremacist groups, especially the fraternity formerly known as Identity Evropa that rose to international prominence in the aftermath of Charlottesville 2017. It explores the intellectual underpinnings of Identitarianism in the work of Guillaume Faye, whose strategic deployments and polemical contortions of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ both mimic and coopt academic discourse within early medieval studies; the rhetorical elision of ethnicity and race provides a convenient cover for mainstreaming pan-European white nationalism and revisionist historiography. Identitarians, by upgrading ecofascist tactics and Malthusian logic, situate themselves at the nexus of late capitalist precariat and contemporary economic, environmental, and political crises. In contrast to Hedley Bull’s neomedievalism, Faye’s New Middle Ages is an archeofuturistic racialist imperium that rejects neoliberalism’s multiracial globalization, revives fictive ancestral values, and envisions a medievalized geopolitical sanctum of whiteness.