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Dean, J orcid.org/0000-0002-1028-0566 (2020) Left politics and popular culture in Britain: From left-wing populism to ‘popular leftism’. Politics. ISSN 0263-3957
Abstract
This article analyses the cultural traction and media visibility yielded by left-wing ideas and people during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as British Labour Party leader (2015–2019), while also offering some more general reflections on the relationship between left politics and popular culture. I begin by noting that the cultural and media aspects of Corbynism have largely been neglected in the scholarly literature. I then go on to caution against the temptation of subsuming the cultural aspects of Corbyn-era left politics under the label of ‘left-wing populism’. Instead, I defend a conception of ‘popular leftism’ as distinct from ‘left-wing populism’, via an engagement with Stuart Hall’s classic essay ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’, as well as Sarah Banet-Wesier’s recent work on popular feminism. The second half of the article maps key features of ‘popular leftism’ as a distinct cultural/political formation that has emerged ‘in and against’ neoliberalism. In particular, it focuses on media visibility, affective tenor, and tactical and intellectual dynamics. While popular leftism’s entanglement with neoliberalism has proved problematic for its transformative capacity, I nonetheless conclude that its emergence is testament to the importance of popular cultural production and consumption in shaping recent iterations of left politics in Britain.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: | |
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | labour party, left politics, neoliberalism, popular culture, populism |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Leverhulme Trust Not Known |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 15 Mar 2021 17:49 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 22:30 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | SAGE |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/0263395720960661 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:168591 |
Available Versions of this Item
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Left Politics and Popular Culture in Britain: From Left-wing Populism to “Popular Leftism”. (deposited 26 Aug 2020 15:08)
- Left politics and popular culture in Britain: From left-wing populism to ‘popular leftism’. (deposited 15 Mar 2021 17:49) [Currently Displayed]