Demographic spectacles mobilize racialized anxiety toward exclusionary futures
Evidence
The decline of the textual and rise of the visual in the collective imagination of nationalism was anticipated by Anderson. Imagined Communities described the transition to the importance of modern technological media that rely on image in addition to print language: “advances in communications technology, especially radio and television, give print allies unavailable a century ago” (1991, 135). Beyond the pivotal role of newspapers and novels, imagined communities have relied on hegemonic tools of representation such as maps but also on the emotionally loaded spectrality of cenotaphs, tombs, and monuments to the Unknown Soldier. In speculative communities, it is through incessant flows of image that power circulates in the compressed time-space of the digital cloud and the seamlessly interconnected apps on our smartphone screens. But at the same time, traditional tools for scaffolding the image of the modern nation continue to reflect retrograde instincts and nativist mythologies. Sociologist Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz (2021), for instance, has shown how recent demographic representations of the US have mobilized racialized ideas to generate a collective sense of trauma and in turn offer valences to xenophobic and exclusionary futures. He calls such regressive visual representations “demographobia”: a nagging anxiety about dystopian demographic futures. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 92
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- DEFINE: Introduces and names the ‘demographobia’ concept.