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 <i>Performing Populism</i> sets out to explain Spanish populism in relation to the performances of its visual politics.<br> <br> 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.<br> <br> From electoral posters to fiction films documentaries and internet memes <i>Performing Populism</i> 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.