Immediacy, residuality, difference: the social life of Heimat in the present populist moment
Dr Nitzan Shoshan (Colegio de México)
Drawing on ongoing fieldwork in the Brandenburg countryside, where the far right Alternative for Germany party scored unprecedented success and the socialist Die Linke—equally branded by many in Germany as populist—has long held political power in various localities, this talk traces the shared currents that background the political rise and consolidation of a populist far right. Observers have noted how emergent antagonisms have reshaped political fault lines in the Federal Republic in recent years. The significance for the rise of populist nationalism of seemingly pervasive, commonsensical tropes in the political discourse of multiple voices across political affiliations, however, has received far less scholarly attention. Through an ethnographic inquiry into the social life of Heimat—a concept that has witnessed a veritable renaissance in contemporary Germany—this talk elaborates three analytical heuristics for thinking about the populist present: first, the notion of immediacy, understood as an object of desire, a promise, as well as valuable political capital; second, the concept of residuality, viewed as the discursive attribution of both historical out-of-placeness and marginality with respect to present hegemonic orders; and, third, ideologies of difference, and especially of essentialized gendered and racialized distinctions.