Performing Populism

Whether or not it constituted a complete break from the past, the 15-M movement’s most important legacy was a more expansive notion of the popular political, one that recognized cultural representation as a mode of political articulation and as part of a political culture. In an effort to understand the populist cycle inaugurated by 15-M, and to do so beyond a series of narrated events, Performing Populism sets out to explain Spanish populism in relation to the performances of its visual politics.

The book’s first part examines how the 15-M movement created a new way of seeing that in turn led to a new way of doing politics in Spain. Part Two focuses on the multiple ramifications of that new vision once the people stopped marching and the movement became less visible.

From electoral posters to fiction films, documentaries, and internet memes, Performing Populism traces the ways that collective Spanish identities evolved from a period when “the people” seemed to have been willingly subsumed under the apathetic ideation of the middle-class consumer to the moment in 2011 when a crisis of representation forced many into political consciousness. This rude awakening kickstarted the reconstruction of a Spanish “us” that staged exhibitions of popular will on par with and parallel to the Arab Spring, but in a European register that embraced the countercultural through art that disremembered its political past but could not escape the ghostly shadow of its history.

Pérez Hidalgo’s Performing Populism is a triumph. Putting images and performance at the heart of understanding contemporary Spanish populism, it weaves together culture and politics and balances deep theoretical insight with grounded empirical observation in a truly masterful way. Genuinely transdisciplinary and creative, this is an exciting and important book. Benjamin Moffitt, author of The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style and Representation

A book like Performing Populism is absolutely necessary to gain a better understanding and a systematic analysis of the visual dimension of populism. Perez Hidalgo’s work is pioneering an alternative approach to populist studies, besides offering an exciting reading of recent political and social events in Spain. Óscar García Agustín, author of Left-Wing Populism: The Politics of the People