The hands of Donald Trump

@article{Hall2016TheHO,  title={The hands of Donald Trump},  author={Kira Hall and Donna M. Goldstein and Matthew Bruce Ingram},  journal={HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory},  year={2016},  volume={6},  pages={71 - 100},  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:55012627}}
Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s transition from billionaire businessman to populist presidential candidate. This article draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory to argue that the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment. We examine the ways that Trump’s unconventional political style, particularly his use of gesture to… 

205 Citations

Trickster’s Triumph: Donald Trump and the New Spirit of Capitalism

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," wrote English romantic poet Shelley (The Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley. Wordsworth Editions, 1994 [1820]: 660) almost 200 years ago.…

A populist grand strategy? Trump and the framing of American decline

What is the role of ‘populism’ in Donald Trump’s foreign policy? Defining populism as a framing style that constructs antagonisms around ‘the people’ and their adversaries, this article explores…

Toward the anthropology of white nationalist postracialism

This article explains Donald Trump’s brutal political effectiveness in terms of his white nationalist appeal. It locates the intellectual, popular, and policy imperatives of Trumpism in a new form of…

Donald Trump’s appeal: a socio-psychoanalytic analysis

ABSTRACT This article explores the appeal of President Donald Trump’s persona in North American society, appeal that enabled the formation of a fan-base-like loyal and passionate constituency. The…

Myth, Fiction and Politics in the Age of Antiheroes: A Case Study of Donald Trump

n this article, we demonstrate that the antihero archetype informs our understanding of Trump in important ways, including his rise to and fall from power. We introduce an analytical framework for…

I, Trump

Abstract This paper contextualizes Donald Trump’s political “Message” (Lempert and Silverstein 2012) within the current anti-intellectualism phenomenon in the Post-Truth era. Trump’s Presidential…

President Trump: celebrity-in-chief and the desecration of political authority

ABSTRACT This article argues that Donald Trump’s persona and his dismissal of established conventions work to position him as a celebrity-in-chief who desecrates politics, political authority and the…

Populism in performance?

Abstract Much commentary on the discourse of Donald Trump’s populist appeal has tended to focus on his use of Twitter, to the relative neglect of his campaign rallies. Yet his campaign rallies during…

The power of Trump-speak: populist crisis narratives and ontological security

Abstract For most observers, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States (US) came as a shock. This has been widely recast as the culmination of the American public’s…

Trump: Transacting trickster

Donald Trump's recent election victory has been greeted with horror and disbelief by many. In particular, the glaring inconsistencies and open self-contradictions that marked his campaign should have…
...

88 References

AMERICAN STIOB: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West

To those of us weaned during the Cold War there are few certainties more bedrock than the antithetical character of liberalism and socialism. For some four…

A Rhetoric of Style

A Rhetoric of Style. By Barry Brummett. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008; pp. 190. $35.00 Paperback. From the perspective of an Enlightenment rationalist, Barry Brummett's A…

Political Style: The Artistry of Power

This text demonstrates how matters of style - diction, manners, sensibility, decor and charisma - influence politics. In critical studies of classic texts, the author identifies four dominant…

Ideologies of legitimate mockery: Margaret Cho's revoicings of mock Asian

This article examines a Korean American comedian’s use of Mock Asian and the ideologies that legitimate this racializing style. These ideologies of legitimacy depend on assumptions about the…

The Society of the Spectacle

For the first time, Guy Debord's pivotal work Society of the Spectacle appears in a definitive and authoritative English translation. Originally published in France in 1967, Society of the Spectacle…

No Billionaire Left Behind: Satirical Activism in America

A glorious summer day in Central Park, New York City. Parasol-toting, tiara-wearing, satin-clad women sip champagne from fluted glasses, while men in lawn-tennis whites play croquet and badminton…

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

“the main disaster of the Middle East to be that it never knew the principle of linguistic humanism as reintroduced in Europe by Dante . . . and later intensified thanks to the Reformation and to the…

Towards an Ideology of Gesture: Gesture, Body Movement, and Language Ideology Among Q'eqchi'-Maya Catholics

While much attention has been paid to how linguistic practices and language ideologies shape local forms of Christianity, relatively little attention has been paid to the role that non-verbal…

Gesture in Political Communication: A Case Study of the Democratic Presidential Candidates During the 2004 Primary Campaign

In this article, I investigate forms and functions of hand-gestures in two Democratic Party primary debates during the 2004 presidential campaign. I argue that in an age of televised politics, the…

Introduction: Beyond Bad Words

As that which ought not to be said, taboo speech involves the moral life of language. Efforts to proscribe speech may be justified variously, by appeal to religious dictates, state policy, or…
...

Related Papers

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers