Ontological Insecurities and Postcolonial Imaginaries: The Emotional Appeal of Populism

In this article, I address the particular narratives and discourses that respond to increased feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear, so-called ontological insecurities, and their connections to the postcolonial imaginaries of populist politics. Recent focus on post-truth politics and alternative facts point to some underlying questions concerning the emotional appeal of particular social imaginaries, such as the appeal and resonance of certain discourses and narratives, as well as the ways in which specific discourses and narratives grip and take an emotional hold of a subject. Of particular importance in terms of populist politics is why specific imaginaries ultimately come together in the imagined object of the other—in this case, the immigrant and/or the refugee other. To understand how power works through emotional discourses and narratives, I discuss how they come to naturalize colonial fears and postcolonial melancholia, played out in myths about “the nation,” “the people,” “the establishment,” and “the immigrant others,” but also how such myths justify the imagined ills of Western society and how they constitute both remedies to and origins of ontological insecurities