240518 SE MM3 All that Folk: Popular Politics in Comparative Perspective (2023W)

Even before notions of the “people” and “populism” have defined modern political imagination, the idea of the “popular” has long haunted social thought. This included concepts of “popular classes” from ancient Rome to industrial Britain, studies of crowds, mobs and riots, as well as a wide, if ill-defined and double-edged notion of “popular culture”. Designed as a series of seminar discussions, this course approaches the “popular” as a constant field of tensions over the ways politics will be defined and practiced across a collective while unequal social terrain.

This seminar is designed as a follow up to the lecture course “Thinking with the People: Theories of Populism”. However, it approaches the matter differently and students can enrol it without any previous familiarity of that other course. Whereas the first course focused on variety of ways populist politics creates unity out of difference, this course explores a multitude of other, less-signified ways through which political action comes forwards as “mattering-forth of the collective flesh” (William Mazzarella). This includes studies of popular politics in variety of its historical and cultural manifestations, from medieval carnivals, early modern “bread riots” to recent online influencers and Yellow Vests.

We first start with theories of populist signification and what they leave unattended, followed by a film screening about postsocialist activist. Then we explore the popular as a site of class and racial struggle, as defined in the works of Stuart Hall and in ethnographies of cultural appropriation (particularly the “theft of carnival” in Brazil). We then explore E.P. Thompson’s notion of “moral economy” as a tacit agreement between the dominant and the dominated in early modern Britain, and inquire how this enriches our understanding of popular uprisings today. One session will focus on “illiberal crowds”, or socialist ways of organising politics that go beyond liberal understanding of politics as free association of individuals. In last two sessions, we will discuss the interplay between the state and the people in Venezuela, by reading selected parts of two books: “Robert Samet’s Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela” and Naomi Schiller’s “Channeling the state: community media and popular politics in Venezuela”.