How do Black Americans practice a politics of racial group uplift while balancing their individual material interests? Traditionally, scholars have drawn on linked fate theory. However, more recent work argues that Black Americans remain politically unified because they feel race-based social pressure to conform more than a sense of linked fate. Employing a novel research design, I use the competitive reality television series, Survivor, to observe and analyze Black group-based decision-making. Through an inductive thematic content analysis of 13 Survivor episodes, I identified five themes in Black players’ discussions of racialized social obligations when playing the game—what I call narratives of racial duty. Claims that emerged in this storytelling suggested that similar to the political world, Black Survivor contestants were keenly aware of the racialized social obligations for them as contestants in the game. For some, this reality felt like a burden. For others, it presented an opportunity. These reactions led some Black players to work together and others to construct a rationale for defecting from race-based alliances. I conclude by making the case that analyzing entertainment programs offers race and politics scholars a new site for identifying common scripts used to adhere to (and sidestep) racialized social norms.

This article proposes the methodological framework of visual narrative analysis through the study of images and narratives. We are interested in the appeal of political storytelling. In applying an approach of layered interpretation, we study images and slogans to consider the more complex underlying narratives in their political and cultural context. Our exploratory case studies draw on material from right-wing populist parties, namely election campaign posters from Germany and the UK as material for the analysis. We find that narratives operate with a ‘fantasmatic logic’, which adds fantasy to politics, to depoliticise and camouflage their radical intent and gain approval by making consent desirable. We identify two exemplary narratives (honest men under threat; proud mothers) that entrench traditional gender roles in accordance with patriarchy and nationalism. Theoretically, our approach contributes to debates in IR on cultural underpinnings in international politics and the construction of collective identities through shared/divided narratives. Visual narrative analysis provides a promising methodological tool for analysing visual representations in their productive relationship with text. This perspective foregrounds the power of political storytelling through fantasmatic appeal and fosters a better understanding of the global rise of populism.