Demonstrating without demands: re-articulating the black populist subject within the post-racial mystique

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe recent groundswell of American social protest illuminates the neoliberal constraints on constructing a people in the twenty-first century. Perhaps no one has better helped facilitate such discussion than Ernesto Laclau in his later work on populist reason. Here, I utilize Laclau's concept of the social demand to examine the rhetorical formation of Black Lives Matter within the cultural context of the post-racial mystique. Whereas Laclau argues concrete struggles transform into popular demands (metonymy), combining with other struggles to form a popular identity (metaphor), I argue Black Lives Matter illustrates an alternative model in which juxtaposition (irony), not popular demand, functions as the quilting point of rhetorical formation. Accordingly, the movement articulates its populist identity by subverting logics of racial equality through the rhetoric of irony.