Joseph Lowndes

Barack Obama’s Body: The Presidency, the Body Politic, and the Contest over American National Identity

Beyond the formal powers and duties laid down in the Constitution, the presidency is a cultural institution meant to represent—in a very literal sense—the American people. Presidents act as identificatory figures—symbolizing what their supporters hold sacred about the nation. Presidents’ own bodies come to matter particularly at political moments when a new or counter-interpretation of national identity challenges prevailing assumptions. Supporters often interpret their national identity in the figure of the president. As a black candidate in a historically white-ruled nation, Barack Obama’s narration of his background as representatively American has been a critical task both as candidate and as president. Both Obama’s biography and his visual presence have come to play a part in how political issues, from health care to foreign policy, get framed by both supporters and opponents. But does race stand alone in this dynamic of life story and looks? I analyze the challenges faced and opportunities afforded the Obama presidency by comparing him to earlier presidents who were politically associated with moments of broad change in American politics: Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all of whom depended heavily on biography and physical embodiment to authorize their vision of national identity. Presidential embodiment ultimately diminishes democratic politics because of the strong fixation on a singular political institution it produces.

Parasites of Government: Racial Antistatism and Representations of Public Employees amid the Great Recession

Abstract: This essay examines cultural representations of race and “parasitism” deployed in attacks against public employees during the Great Recession. Beginning in 2009, a chorus of critics charged that unionized public employees were becoming, in the words of Rush Limbaugh, “parasites of government,” dependent subjects that consumed tax dollars and productive labor to subsidize a profligate lifestyle. Such narratives of parasitism have long been racialized and gendered; subjects marked as “welfare queens” and “illegal aliens,” among others, have been similarly condemned as freeloaders who feed off the labor of hardworking (white) taxpayers. By analyzing political cartoons, television shows, political advertisements, and speeches, we demonstrate how constructions of parasitism have become transposed onto white workers, including emergency workers and teachers, who have traditionally been exempt from such charges. These attacks reflect the most recent development of an antistatist politics that had historically assailed the redistributive state through its association with racialized dependents. Now certain white beneficiaries of state action have been absorbed within the same cultural and political logic. During the current age of inequality, the state-sponsored “affirmative action for whites” promised since the New Deal is no longer guaranteed.

“The Most Damage I Can Do”: Joel Olson in Political Theory, Political Critique, and Political Activism

The following essays were initially written for a roundtable in celebration of Joel’s work that was convened at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association in 2012.We set out to speak about the wide range of commitments and concerns that shaped Joel’s career as an activist-teacher-scholar: anarchism, the abolition of whiteness, the virtues of fanaticism, the dangers of corporate capitalism, and the necessity and joys of grass-roots action. Joel set so many forces in motion that what we hoped to accomplish by our engagement was not merely to look back in remembrance but to keep moving forward. Yet very few, if any, of us feel equal to the example that Joel set. From the beginning of his academic career at the University of Minnesota in 1991, Joel integrated political activism with intellectual inquiry. This is not to say that he bent ideas to serve political ends but that he posed questions to the history of political thought that would bring insights to his politics. Early on, that politics was anarchism and his political theory interlocutor was Hannah Arendt. A seminar that he took with me inspired him to a critical engagement with Arendt’s “council democracies” and the revolutionary committees of the Spanish anarchists. It first took shape as a seminar paper but Joel lost no time in asking me what it would take to develop it for publication. He was characteristically New Political Science, 2014 Vol. 36, No. 2, 238–265, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2014.894702