Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 1/2024

What populisms and anti-vaccination movements have in common is a radical distrust of established forms of rule. Demagogues like Victor Orban and Donald Trump try to capitalise on this distrust and fuel their anti-democratic agenda. Against this background, mistrust in governance has recently become suspicious, even though it used to be an essential part of civil society politics at least until the 1980s. When, e.g., the German state ordered a population census in 1987, it was met with mistrust among liberally minded citizens who took it as a means of illicit state encroachment. However, the nowadays popular distrust of mistrust dismisses its emancipatory potential. This article is an attempt to bring this potential back to the fore. For this purpose, I focus on a pre-modern form of antigovernance in segmentary societies without an institutionalized centre of power in highland northeast Georgia. In order to assess the role of mistrust in the constitution of politics in these societies and to derive some lessons for emancipatory politics, I draw a comparison to the distrust of power as expressed in the anti-vaccination protests. In my conclusion, I argue that for mistrust to develop its emancipatory potential, it also needs to be directed inwards. The lacking mistrust within populist movement thus appears as a problem of at least equal size to the widespread mistrust towards ›the mainstream‹.

In representative democracies, trust between the governing and the governed is of central importance to bridge the gap that emerges between electoral events. Accordingly, political performances are adjusted to presenting political actors not only as competent, but more fundamentally as trustworthy. Starting off from a narratological perspective, in this contribution I will reflect on the relevance of empathy and emotions for such political performances. I will argue that we can currently observe the emergence of a specific variant of producing trustworthiness which presents politics as a complex, burdensome and painful business. This type of narrative aims at evoking empathy on the part of the governed by claiming to give insight into the emotional states and painful experiences of political actors. According to this rationale, trust is supposed to emerge due to the fact that politicians would face the same struggles and dilemmas as ›ordinary people‹ do. I will reconstruct the narrative logic of this trust performance on the basis of recent examples of political communication, try to make sense of why it has recently emerged and reflect on both its potentials and risks for democratic governing.

In recent years, many narrations of migrant and refugee stories oscillate between novel and autobiography. Sasǎ Stanisǐc ́ is one of the authors who shares his story via his literary texts and stirs between fact and fiction. In the texts that address his personal story – the first one, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert, framed as a novel, the second one, Herkunft, framed neither as a novel nor as an autobiography but as something in between – Stanišic ́tells readers about a boy who has to flee his country and build a new life as well as of an adult who returns home after several years. He also, more importantly, particularly stresses the possible functions of narrating when it comes to questions of (mis)trust and trustworthiness. In contrast to the uncertainties that the migrant protagonists face on several levels, Stanišic ́uses narrative techniques that create a realm beyond the plot in which trust becomes possible. In Herkunft, these techniques include the use of a so-called ›Spielbuch‹ which gives readers the opportunity to decide how the story ends as well as unreliable narration that – against intuition – creates trustworthiness, binds readers closer to the narrator and therefore creates a compensatory space to the plot.

This contribution reconsiders the relation between marginalized communities and the hegemonic U.S. American nation through a focus on crisis and an affective perspective on trust. I propose that mutual distrust between the nation and its citizens is a structural affective component of America’s »cultural politics of emotion« (Ahmed 2004) that (re)surfaces particularly in moments of crisis. Against this backdrop, I examine how Black Americans and Asian-Americans have expressed their fundamental distrust in the promises of the American nation, and thus challenge, subvert, and even disengage from »cruel optimism« and the fantasy of »the good life« (Berlant 2011). In five case studies – ranging from Nina Simone’s »Mississippi Goddam«, to excerpts from James Baldwin’s and Audre Lorde’s talks and nonfiction, to John Okada’s No-No Boy and Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings – I will show that these expressions not only illustrate how the (un)doing of trust shapes the racialized experiences of living in the affective economy of the United States by delineating the coordinates of belonging in and to the nation, but also how strategic distrust can be used as a form of empowerment and resistance.

The article analyses how trust is constituted and disrupted – ›(un)done‹ – through literary and geological form. Practices of trust, I contend, are expressed in the ritualised use of established modes of narration that may negotiate states of crises and (slow) disasters. I consider dystopia and the Gothic as crisis modes that are relied upon on an extraliterary level, while, paradoxically, their narrative composition undermines reliability. In the British context, the historicity of the two modes connects them to a sense of the nation; a nation that is troubled by the xenophobia present in the Brexit debates and decision and by an increasingly eroding environment as the climate crisis catalyses the loss of the identity-relevant shorelines. The two novels chosen for scrutiny are both set on this porous and precarious site and may be read in the wider context of the Brexit discourse. In Helen Oyeyemi’s Gothic novel White is for Witching (2009), form is eroding when the famous white cliffs of Dover are indeed ›being eaten‹. In John Lanchester’s dystopic novel The Wall (2019), form literally becomes concrete as the eponymous wall structures lives and livelihoods in a vision of Britain post erosion. The aim of the article is to contribute to a discussion of form as practices and containers of trust in a world in which geological and environmental forms are radically altered.

Using Heinrich von Kleist’s novella The Betrothal in Santo Domingo (1811) as a case study, this article analyzes the connection between practices of trust and mistrust, the form of Kleist’s text, and the historical context in which it is set: the Haitian Revolution shortly before its victory in 1803. In a situation of mistrust within a colonial racist society at the moment of its overthrow, Kleist’s novella depicts attempts to generate trust through certain practices (doing trust). Its specific form, however, is characterized by incongruities that rather generate mistrust (doing mistrust). The form of the text therefore corresponds with the historical situation of revolutionary upheaval.