Rage Days

• Main Authors: Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, Visentin, Martina
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Springer International Publishing 2023
• Subjects: Indian; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33099-5_6; https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-031-33099-5_6

Abstract There has been a perceptible shift from class politics to identity politics in the last few decades, and this is not just the case in the North Atlantic world – from Trump to Orban, from Brexit to Salvini and more recently Meloni. Unlike in the postwar decades, Indian politics are to a great extent defined through hindutva , Hindu nationalism, as a centre of gravity; contemporary Chinese political rhetoric does not delve into the virtues of Communism as much as it glorifies the history and current achievements of the great Chinese nation; in African societies, conceptualizations of autochthony – first-comers – have become important aspects of rights claims in ways that were unknown until recently, and similar tendencies can be discerned in Latin America as well. Politicized nostalgia and an eagerness to build walls, physical and virtual, against the impurities and contaminations of the outside world, are pitted against an enthusiasm for openness, free trade and cultural exchanges, sometimes aligned with cosmopolitan values and inclusive forms of humanism whereby the rights of migrants and cultural minorities are defended on universalist grounds. In other words, people in otherwise very different societies raise strikingly similar questions about who they are and what that entails. In rapidly changing surroundings, the answers are fraught with controversy, often pitting ambivalence and doubt against withdrawal and reassertions of boundaries. The Overheating approach represents a perspective on identity which aims to take previous theorising a step further. Shifting, multiple, contested and unstable social identities that hold out a promise to form the basis for a meaningful sense of belonging are taken as a starting point, not as a conclusion, and they are viewed through the lens of accelerated change. It is as if modernity shifted to a higher gear towards the end of the twentieth century.