Subversive Semantics in Political and Cultural Discourse

The large-scale use of semantic transfer and inversion as rhetorical tactics is particularly prevalent in right-wing discourses and populist 'alternative knowledge' production. The contributors to this volume analyze processes of re-semanticizing received meanings, effectually re-coding those meanings. They investigate to what extent rhetorical maneuvers serve to establish new and powerful belief systems beyond rational and democratic control. In addition to the contemporary rightwing and conspiracy narratives, the contributions examine the discursive fields around conceptions of human nature and the deep past, population politics, gender conceptions, use of land, identity politics, nationhood, and cultural heritage.

Gesa Mackenthun is a professor of American studies at Universität Rostock. She initiated the DFG graduate school Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship. Her books include Embattled Excavations. Colonial and Transcultural Constructions of the American Deep Past (2021), Metaphors of Dispossession (1997), Fictions of the Black Atlantic (2004), and the co-edited volume Decolonizing >Prehistory. Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (with Christen Mucher, 2021).