Mary N. Taylor - Populism, Antipopulism, and the Construction of “the People” in Hungary

Wednesday, 10.1.2018 2:45h
Conference - Solidarity in Danger: Sites of Populism

Lecture - "Populism, Antipopulism, and the Construction of “the People” in Hungary" by Mary N. Taylor

This presentation will have two parts. The first will address the way in which the label “populism” today functions to legitimate a form of technocratic rule that is common in the neoliberal/post-socialist era. By uncovering the work of “liberal antipopulism,” I hope to clear our vision for a deeper view of problems of democracy faced not just in Hungary but more broadly in the “post-political” moment and to make visible aspects of the struggle over the definition of “the people” that go beyond rhetoric. In the second part, I draw on historical and contemporary practices and ideologies of the Hungarian “folk” movement to address questions of how “the people” is constructed in relationship to Hungarianness under particular historical conditions.

Mary N. Taylor is Assistant Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on sites, techniques and politics of civic cultivation, social movement, and cultural management; the relationship of ethics and aesthetics to nationalism and cultural differentiation; and people’s movements in interwar, socialist and postsocialist Hungary, East Europe, and the Balkans. She is a member of the editorial collective of LeftEast, co-organizer of an annual roving summer school on “neoliberalizing postsocialism,” and co-founder of the Brooklyn Laundry Social Club. Her writing has been published in an array of fora, including Focaal, Bajo el Volcán, and Hungarian Studies, and she is currently completing her book Movement of the People: Folk Dance, Populism and Citizenship in Hungary.

Видео Mary N. Taylor - Populism, Antipopulism, and the Construction of “the People” in Hungary канала Einstein Forum