The spatiotemporality of nationalist populism and the production of political subjectivities

Abstract

While recent research has made progress in analytically disentangling “nationalism” from “populism”, the question that is left unanswered is why, from an empirical standpoint, populist movements typically impinge on national(ist) modalities. I argue that this impasse is encountered because research has not yet comprehensively examined the manner, and the extent to which, nationalism comes to be imbricated in the spatiotemporal organization of power relations, through which political subjectivities emerge. I argue that nationalism should be understood as a “hegemonic milieu” that comes to be consolidated through the broad but uneven symbolic dispersion of national(ist) modalities in “spatial” configurations, where heterogeneous affective referents come to be consolidated in reference to “the nation”. Thus, the temporal unfolding of political subjectivities in the “populist moment”—which beholds subversive potential—will inevitably dovetail into already-structurated experiences that are diversely marked by nationalist modalities. Nationalist populism is therefore deemed to inhere in the structure-freedom nexus.