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Empire after Liberalism: The Transatlantic Right and Identitarian War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2021

CHRISTOPHER VIALS
CHRISTOPHER VIALS*
Affiliation:
English Department, University of Connecticut. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

American studies has developed excellent critiques of post-1945 imperial modes that are grounded in human rights and Enlightenment liberalism. But to fully gauge US violence in the twenty-first century, we also need to more closely consider antiliberal cultural logics. This essay traces an emergent mode of white nationalist militarism that it calls Identitarian war. It consists, on the one hand, of a formal ideology informed by Identitarian ethno-pluralism and Carl Schmitt, and, on the other, an openly violent white male “structure of feeling” embodied by the film and graphic novel 300, a key source text for the transatlantic far right.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , February 2022 , pp. 87 - 112
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies

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References

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30 Anton does not actively tout Schmitt in his writings, but he was deeply influenced by Schmitt's key disciple in the United States, the arch-reactionary, antiliberal political philosopher Leo Strauss.

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