The Introduction contextualises the book’s broader arguments by sketching out its overall narrative arc – relating to the contested consolidation of memories of the inter-war period – exploring previous explanations of this problem and foregrounding this book’s focus on everyday conversations about recent history. The Introduction explains the broader significance of these arguments for histories of popular politics and political history’s methods more broadly.

“Cacophony” was the term appropriately chosen by David Bell more than twenty years ago to sum up recent research on early modern nationalism (in France).1 His diagnosis still stands. The sources of this dissonance can clearly be traced to the “political language” (as Pocock and Skinner call it) of nationhood itself. Its longue durée encourages the assumption that the nation was “always already” there; moreover, it is many sided, and its key concepts – nation, Volk, (father)land, kingdom, the French, the Germans, etc. – are each distinct rather than interchangeable.2 Because this political language displays a high degree of congruency across the individual language areas of early modern Latin Christendom, this congruence of signifiers in the vernacular is frequently taken at face value to equal a congruence of the things signified.

The Communist revolution from the 1950s to the 1970s unleashed an excess of olfactory anomalies. In the lexicon of Mao-era politics, class enemies are ‘dog shit’ and labour camps are ‘cowsheds’. A method to castigate landowners and capitalists is to ‘stinken’ (douchou) them, and the bourgeois ‘fragrant breeze’ has to be perceived as stinking air. Chapter 6 measures the mighty symbolic power commanded by the olfactory in the moral–political regime of Maoist China, and ponders its jarring relationship with the teleology of Western olfactory modernity. Adopting the keywords approach initiated by Raymond Williams, I analyse a number of smell-related keywords that pervade Mao Zedong’s writings, party documents, and official media. Bridging the biological and the social, this olfactory glossary maps the emotional states of paranoia, rudeness, ruthlessness, and love–hate, all necessary ingredients of the Communist revolution. Overall, Mao’s olfactory revolution was yet another round of retuning the neurons, and yet smell never fails in laughing at the absurdity of human acts evidenced by the contradictions embedded in the propaganda discourse.

This substantial introduction covers Trump’s divisive verbal shock tactics during his rise. It offers a history of presidential oratory and speech style, discusses Trump’s use of social media, and his rhetorical feedback loop with his supporters. It analyzes the way the “culture wars” over so-called “politically correct language” feed into Trump’s popularity and the dismay of his critics. Trump supporters often refuse the notion that word choice creates problems, arguing instead that linguistic care stokes oversensitivity, or that it evades harsh realities that harsh language merely describes. They also feel his simple, profane verbal style and even his spelling and grammatical errors reflect his “authenticity” and positive masculinity. Trump’s critics, meanwhile, believe his insulting words and hate speech incite violence while his style denotes lack of education and care, possibly even dementia, while demoting the verbal standards expected of a president. Disagreements over Trump’s verbal style and propriety have sometimes played out over class lines. Trump’s well documented prevarications have exhausted journalists and seemed to influence his supporters, some of whom take his statements as merely hyperbolic articulations of a deeper underlying truth.

The introduction presents the book’s primary themes of truth, the postcolony, borders and violence. Situated in the historiography of African decolonisation, it emphasises the necessity of considering the emergence of the postcolony in the relationship between states and peoples, rather than through the relationship with the coloniser alone. It treats decolonisation as a search for certainty around what community and authority would mean in the postcolony, a process lasting far beyond the date of independence. Surveying approaches to citizenship as action and as words, it focuses on variations of political language in historiography and linguistic anthropology, and contextualises the setting of the book in literature on African borderlands and the ‘margins’ of the state. It provides preliminary observations on truth, truth-speaking and their role in official political speech and unofficial rumour in 1950s Burundi, while observing some common philosophical conceptions of the relationship between truth and violence. It then presents the methodologies employed, along with the practical and ethical questions concerning the focus on truth, and ends with an overview of the book.