Leerom Medovoi
I propose to write a book that will analyze climate change anxieties as an unconscious animating force for the contemporary right-wing populist racial politics of threat. The triangulated rhetoric of today’s populist racism rings an alarm about a vulnerable national people under assault both from corrupt elites above and dangerous foreigners below. The targeting of these dual populations in turn serves to displace—but also to concretize—more amorphous forms of foreboding derived from the unpredictable dangers posed by climate change. This project will extend the analysis of racism as elaborated in my recent book The Inner Life of Race, which argued that racism is a technology of security premised upon ideological conceptions of defense against a social threat within the population. It will revise the earlier study’s genealogical approach to racism, however, by exploring the political psychodynamics of racial disavowal, displacement and conspiracy theorizing.