Leisure and the racing of national populism

Abstract

While leisure, race, and national populism have been minimally linked and theorized in the literature, we take this moment, during the global turn to national populism and conservative regimes, to center leisure and race in the politics of today. While theorizing the link to leisure and national populism, we center how the turn towards ethno-nationalist populism derives from the workings of race, alongside class, caste, and ethnicity, in various global north and global south leisure contexts. We provide an introduction that puts in conversation the realms of leisure (in all its possibilities), race, and the various modes of national populism. Therefore, we provide both the important theoretical foundations to understanding these relationships while offering numerous instances of such shifts to national populism. In particular, we start the conversation with a case of the realm of art, sport, and protest as a way to pull out the extraordinary links to social phenomenon, power, and theory.

Radical right populist politics in Hungary: Reinventing the Magyars through sport

“…For example, Scalia's (2009) analysis of the interconnection between football and politics in Italy contends that football clubs have been used by contemporary Italian politicians as a 'branch of their patronage machine ' (2009: 48), which for some clubs has led to an alignment with extreme right-wing political causes. More recently, the English context has also witnessed the rise of right-wing political movements such as the Democratic Football Lads Alliance which have spawned from football fan cultures (Thangaraj et al, 2018).…”

Hierarchical Assemblages of Citizenship and Belonging: The Pedestrian Speech Acts of British Gujarati Indian Walkers

“…Spaces of leisure whilst not necessarily politically "neutral", are spaces where acts of resistance, solidarity and friendship, have the potential to foster alliances across new and shifting hierarchical assemblages of citizenship and belonging (e.g. see Amin, 2012;Chowdhary and Philipose, 2018;Jackson, 2018;Thangaraj et al, 2018), uniting us even as socio-economic, cultural and political forces divide us, from one another, and the spaces and places that we choose to call "home". Figure 10: Luxs' photo showing a former pub taken-over and extended, selling cheap bedroom furniture with boxes of goods spilling out onto the pavement.…”

“…Back and Sinha, 2016; Gilroy, 2004; Vincent et al, 2018). Yet, the ‘burning acts’ (Nayak, 2017: 299), which materially and symbolically put racial bodies out ‘in’ their spaces of ‘home’, has made me more determined to explicitly name ‘race’ and ‘racism’ (see also, Meghji and Saini, 2017; Thangaraj et al, 2018; Valluvan, 2016). In relation to this racist, urban multicultural context – or what Back terms (1996) the metropolitan paradox – state and public celebrations of some South Asian communities in Britain (including those of Gujarati Indian heritage) as examples of model minority citizens, can operate simultaneously alongside re/presentations of ‘them’ as culturally segregated, disloyal and potentially terrorist members of the nation.…”

“…De Certeau is particularly concerned with everyday life, and the (re)production of dominant discourses about the social world. He suggests that the ideological repertoires performed by political authorities, and public institutions, often include the selective use of ‘data’ and/or ‘alternative facts’ (Jones et al, 2017; Thangaraj et al, 2018). Although we may know such common-sense arguments are ‘a pile of crap’ (de Certeau, 1984: 188), the historical sticky-ness of colonial, imperial, European, white, sexual and gendered framings of the racial ‘Other’ are nevertheless difficult to shift (Amos and Parmar, 1984).…”

“…Building upon studies of informal leisure (Watson and Ratna, 2011;Thangaraj et al, 2018) and more recent sociological analyses of urban multi-culture (e.g. Jackson, 2018;Neal et al, 2018;Back et al, 2018;Valluvan, 2016;Yuval-Davis, Wemyss and Cassidy, 2018), I focus upon walking not only as a leisure pastime but also as a methodological approach, using pedestrian speech acts to explore "small" and "big" constructions and re/presentations of cityspaces.…”