CANCELLED The Identitarian Reflex: “Metapolitical” Strategies in the New Right’s Culture Wars
The Identitarian Reflex: “Metapolitical” Strategies in the New Right’s Culture Wars
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In this talk, Johannes von Moltke sheds light on the New Right’s mobilization of arts and ideas in today’s culture wars: its media strategies, identity politics, conspiracy theories, and efforts to shift the very language of public discourse to the right – or what the New Right calls its “metapolitics.” Situated outside the socio-political institutions and structures typically analyzed by the social sciences, the cultural formations of “metapolitics” call for humanities-based approaches that can supplement the important insights gleaned in political science and sociology. Drawing his guiding questions and methods from Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, von Moltke analyzes the New Right’s “metapolitical” maneuvers on both sides of the Atlantic to better understand the antidemocratic appeals made in the name of ethnonationalist, “identitarian” visions of the future.
Johannes von Moltke is the Rudolf Arnheim Collegiate Professor of German and Film, TV & Media at the University of Michigan, where he currently directs the International Institute. He is the author of No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema and The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America. In addition to several other edited volumes, he co-edited Helmuth James and Freya von Moltke’s Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence 1944-1945 (NYRB Books). He has written extensively on German film, film theory, and Critical Theory for New German Critique, Cinema Journal, October, the New York Review of Books, among others. Johannes is a Past President of the German Studies Association, and President of the American Friends of Marbach. In 2024, he held a Berlin Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, where he researched the cultural politics of the transatlantic New Right.
(This event is possible with support from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund at Yale University).