Some of the most persistent questions in academic and popular discourse about conspiracy theories have to do with their unique relationship between production and reception; they are created and recreated as they spread, and although their essential shape is fixed, each new retelling has the capacity to add to the theory and to mold it to a new space and time. This has given conspiracy theories some unusual behaviors. How can we account for their rapid spread, when each iteration of a single theory seems different from the last? This behavior produces many internal inconsistencies and fringe claims; why does this have no noticeable effect on the theory’s popularity? Today, the internet and social media clearly fuel the circulation of conspiracy theories, particularly in terms of speed and scope, but mobility has always been a feature of conspiracy theories no matter the technologies available to them. The social sciences can offer crucial insights into such questions, but recent developments in literary studies have also shown that conspiracy theories must be understood in terms of their narrative structures and functions (see, in particular, Plots: Literary Form and Conspiracy Culture [2021]). Doing so enables us to think about the spread of conspiracy theories through narrative circulation and reception—i.e., as stories that are read, interpreted, and recirculated to specific kinds of audiences with particular generic capacities and expectations. The mobility of conspiracy theories, in other words, is not only or even necessarily a function of technology or social psychology, but of genre and cultures of reception.
The diverse geographical and historical contexts of the papers in this session (from the Middle Ages to the 21st century, from India to El Salvador) reveal the importance of global perspectives on the nature and narrative structure(s) of conspiracy theories, but the papers are also striking in their shared attention to matters of production and reception. Jordan Skinner’s paper on the “Norman Yoke Theory,” for example, traces the centuries-long persistence and evolution of a conspiracy theory surrounding England’s curfew law and what its nightly “curfew bell” symbolized in terms of the legacies of William the Conqueror. In her paper on the novels of Honduran-Salvadoran author Horacio Castellanos Moya, Katherine Sugg examines structurally similar phenomena in a very different context, revealing “how conspiracy theories and the fears they reflect get lodged in individual and collective consciousness.” Moya’s novels, Sugg argues, demonstrate how the genres of conspiracy theories become “distorted forms of thinking” that warp the minds of entire populations in contexts of state violence. James McBride’s paper bears witness to a similar accumulation of distortions in the U.S. through the reception of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of Saints by Renaud Camus whose anti-immigrant “Great Replacement” theory subsequently influenced the white nationalists who, following Donald Trump, shifted political discourse in the U.S. away from policy debates toward conspiracy-driven narratives.
The last paper in this session shares much in common with the others in its attention to questions of production, circulation, and reception, but it also offers a provocative reminder that conspiracy as a mode of organization and narrative orientation can enable resistance to systems of authority that demand conformity and visibility. In “The Queer Conspiracy of Illegibility,” Namrata Verghese examines a form of conspiracy among queer writers in India who subvert the law’s insistence upon legibility and visibility in judgments about obscenity in fiction. Here, conspiracy is a shared or collective commitment among marginalized writers to circulate texts capable of keeping the unknown unknowable and the unseen unseeable with the terms and expectations of the law. Verghese ultimately challenges the terms of conspiracy itself and invites a broader perspective on the limits vs. the possibilities of unreadable forms of political alignment and action.
Organizers have made an effort to select panelists with diverse backgrounds and points of view in terms of academic rank, area/subject expertise, gender, and race. Additionally, because this proposed session has four papers, we will ask participants to prepare 12-minute papers (a limit the chair will enforce), leaving at least 20 minutes at the end for discussion. We also expect our two sessions to have a great deal of common ground, allowing the discussion from one to flow over into the other.