Populism in dispute: cultural essentialism, political nostalgia and lost futures

Our era is marked by frustrated attempts at social transformation. One of the main symptoms of “capitalist realism” is the rise of nostalgia and need to “return” (to traditional family forms, to narrow conceptions of the political subject or to essentialist conceptions of the nation). What is this need to go back a symptom of? This “structure of feeling” must be treated with utmost care to neutralize its reactionary framing and, at the same time, to illuminate another relationship with the past, with sufficient creativity and imagination to find the traces of other possibilities in popular culture and attend to the creative powers that beset us.

With Germán Cano and Antonio Gómez Villar.