Description
In recent years, the politics of rebellion has fundamentally shaped internatioanl political life. Drawing on long histories of Black radical politics, the Black Lives Matter movement has forced a reckoning with racist policing, colonial legacies, and institutionalised anti-Blackness. Meanwhile Extinction Rebellion have repeatedly placed the climate emergency at the centre of political discourse. Both movements mount important challenges to the entrenched hierarchies of liberal/racial capitalism. At the same time, and in sharp contrast, a series of more reactionary political currents are also mobilising the intellectual, aesthetic and affective politics of rebellion. This includes elements of the alt-right and anti-mask/COVID ‘sceptic’ activists. While the politics of those movements are not substantively opposed to existing structures of local and global power, their political strategy turns in part on the recognition that the claim to be rebelling against authority has become a standard move to legitimacy in liberal democratic societies.
This paper explores the disjunctions and resonances between these opposing figurations of rebellion. It asks how such contrasting projects are able to mobilise often unnervingly similar political registers. Is this simply a case of surface-level resemblance or co-optation by the right, or are there more substantive relationships and complicities to be addressed? In what ways does the apparently easy adoption of rebellious imagery and rhetoric by the alt-right and other neo-fascist movements unsettle the categories of progressive politics? How are reactionary global solidarities formed through rebellious imaginaries? What does this mean for the radical emancipatory project implied by the idea of rebellion? Through a comparative study of these different political mobilisations, the paper charts the ambiguous political life of rebellion. It is guided by the twin aims of understanding how the concept is increasingly deployed in the service of political violence, and cultivating the ground for more liberatory uses.
