ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This paper aims to discuss the relationship between the phenomenon of post-truth and the politics of emotion and thereby examine Ward Kendall’s SF Hold Back This Day. According to the Oxford Dictionaries that named it 2016’s word of the year, post-truth is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective fact are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” It is true that a post-truth era has arrived, when emotion has more weight than evidence, and alternative facts replace actual facts. This paper focuses on the fact that the politics of post-truth necessarily relies on the politics of emotion. Post-truth amounts to a form of political domination for which its practitioners exploit people’s particular emotions and psychological bias and compel them to believe in something whether there is evidence or not. Disgust is a major emotion that this study pays more attention to. It refers to a group of interrelated aversive emotions, that is, what this paper calls a triad complex of disgust, hatred, and fear. As well known, the era of Donald Trump revealed how intimately the politics of post-truth got hand in hand with the politics of disgust. Hold Back This Day, one of white supremacist favorites that Trump and his closest far-right allies have been indulged in, shows an interesting example of how the politics of post-truth and emotion can effectively contribute to propagating a dystopian future of white extinction that appeals to both the hatred of non-white people and the revival of white nation. By analyzing Kendall’s narrative, this paper hopes to draw more attention to the problems of post-truth and its politics.

키워드