While there are numerous literary critical accounts of postmodern paranoia, as well as a plethora of studies of the new paranoid style within the social sciences, there has been a surprising dearth of treatments of contemporary paranoia in the humanities. The papers assembled in this panel are organized around a series of questions that emerge from this gap: Does the prevalence of conspiracism on the New Right mean that there is no place for a leftist critique that deploys paranoia to more progressive political ends? What, if anything, can paranoia do for a politics that seeks to resist rather than reinforce the structures of late capitalism, social inequity, racial discrimination, and neofascism? Can paranoia help mitigate, dismantle, and replace the symptoms and structures of the present polycrisis? These papers reckon with how literary and cultural objects are grappling with these pressing questions, distilling what is unique about paranoia’s present manifestations and tracing continuities with past paranoid forms.
First, Maria Cichocz examines the phenomenon of literary “red-pilling” using Tao Lin as a case study. Analyzing Lin’s writings from 2013 to today, Cichocz underscores how contemporary wellness cultures of “conspirtuality” and “corporadelics” (the intersection of psychedelics and technocratic capitalism) use a paranoid logic to reconfigure complex “threatening” issues like autism or pollution into an identifiable set of variables that individuals can, in theory, limit or control. The paper ultimately asserts that Lin’s work interrogates how contemporary right-wing paranoia offers a form of agency by providing a map for navigating the uncertain nature of reality through individual thought and action.
Next, Alexandra Bliziotis’s paper draws from media-theoretical frameworks of networked cultures and affect theory to examine how the internet’s fragmented nature undergirds and authenticates the paranoid literature of the new online-Right. In the context of the recent surge in alt-right digital culture and the “Dark Enlightenment,” the paper takes an expansive view of how the new dissident right has built an influential corpus of independently published literature that seeks to narrativize the perceived “decline of the West” through the production of paranoid counter-histories.
Thirdly, Jumi Kim argues that Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric offers a conceptual apparatus for redefining African American literature’s melancholic, hypervigilant, and paranoid registers as a strategic response to structures of anti-blackness. The paper’s reading of Citizen defends the much-vilified paranoid hermeneutics of racial critique against the (neo)liberal grammar of receptivity and remediation. Rather than pathologizing heightened sensitivity to this hostile atmosphere, Rankine’s lyric reclaims it as a source of knowledge that allows the minority subject to navigate racial politics in the midst of an ostensibly “postracial” or “colorblind” American citizenry.
Finally, Timothy Lem-Smith contends that a body of contemporary American literature has been deploying a "paranoid aesthetic" to conceptualize the overlapping issues of our time, from racializing surveillance capitalism, to systemic anti-blackness, to apocalyptic climate change. The paper situates recent fiction by Colson Whitehead, Percival Everett, and Ling Ma within a broader impetus in US fiction towards experimenting with paranoid narrative modes that are both influenced by and moving beyond the purview of postmodernism. Lem-Smith’s paper postulates that contemporary American literature salvages paranoia from both the corrosive conspiracism of the New Right and “postcritical” dismissals to offer a new paranoid politics for the present.
The panel’s investment in providing a platform for a diversity of voices is made manifest not only in these papers’ multifarious subjects—which range from the toxic paranoias of white male oligarchs all the way to the oppositional paranoias of dispossessed, racialized, and minoritized groups—but in the diverse positionalities of the presenters themselves, each of whom comes to the discussion with perspectives from different career stages, expertise, and marked subjectivities.
Papers will be held to a strict 12-minute time limit to enable speakers to engage with each other and the audience during a moderated discussion period of at least 15 minutes.