Resurgent White Nationalism: From Fascist Nostalgia to Toxic Memes

The Global New Right Working Group at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join a book talk for Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination with the author Alexandra Minna Stern.

This talk explores salient ideologies of resurgent white nationalism in America, with a focus on questions of time, history, and nostalgia. Looking at the temporal and narrative frames of contemporary neo-fascism can reveal what is both novel and predictable about its xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-feminism. Stern connects the bedrock of contemporary far-right ideas to the more ephemeral realm of digital cultures, looking at toxic and morphing memes on social media that have gained traction (and been associated with extremist violence) in recent years.

Alexandra Minna Stern, Ph.D. is the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor of American Culture, History, and Women’s Studies and Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan. She is the author of the award-winning Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America which was published in the second edition by the University of California Press in 2016. She also is author of Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), a Choice 2013 Outstanding Academic Title in Health Sciences. Her recent book, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination (Beacon Press, 2019) applies the lenses of historical analysis, feminist studies, and critical race studies to deconstruct the core ideas of the alt-right and white nationalism. Stern leads the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, which uses mixed methods to study patterns and experiences of eugenic sterilization in the twentieth-century United States; this research has informed policy efforts to provide redress to survivors of compulsory sterilization.