notes from fallow
againism
Nostalgia (from nostos—return home, and algia—longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.
—Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia
again (adverb): i. one more time; ii. back to the original place or condition; iii. another time, once more, anew; iv. to a previous position or place; v. in return (archaic)
great (adjective): i. notably large in size; ii. large in number or measure; iii. remarkable in magnitude, degree, or effectiveness; iv. eminent, distinguished; v. famous, powerful, or important as one of a particular type; vi. extreme; vii. very good
i.
Operation internet search:
“make” “great again,” exclude “America”
make African great again (mAga)
Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA)
Make Kenya Great Again1
Make Nigeria Great Again
On and on.2
Anything—and it seems everything—can be “made great again,” or so a casual search online suggests. What has made this particular phrasing so appealing?
I have been wondering if there is something we might call againism that is related to, but distinct from, nostalgia.
Againism is not longing for a past state—whether real or imagined. It does not want to return. Instead, it wants to repeat. Even when what againism seeks to repeat might be—and most often is—a fantasy.
ii.
Fantasy is at play in the articulation of both individual and collective identity; it extracts coherence from confusion, reduces multiplicity to singularity, and reconciles illicit desire with the law. It enables individuals and groups to give themselves histories.
—Joan Scott, “Fantasy Echo”
In common parlance, fantasy is what you get up to when the surveying mind and surveying society are both looking the other way. Fantasy is supremely asocial. Double licentious, it creates a world of pleasure without obligation to what is either permissible or possible, outside the realm of fantasy, to do.
—Jacqueline Rose, “States of Fantasy”
There is no way of understanding political identities and destinies without letting fantasy into the frame.
–Jacqueline Rose, “State of Fantasy”
As I read Joan Scott and Jacqueline Rose on fantasy, I am struck by the notion that fantasy binds temporalities. Nostalgia might look back and try to recapture a feeling or experience, but fantasy attempts to bind past to present, and, if possible, repeat that past into the present. Yet, what is being repeated might not have existed in a specific past. It, too, is fantasy, being materialized by the force of desire.
Before I lose myself: againism is a structure of repetition that works through fantasy—fantasies of the past and future—to secure an ongoingness, if not persistence, of something, sometimes a political state (as Jacqueline Rose maps) or a kind of identification (patriarchal masculinity, domestic femininity, if we think of the manosphere and trad wife blend).
iii.
To say that againism works through fantasy is not to discount that it seeks—and effects—material change, often causing great harm.
Across multiple nationalist rhetorics, againism pursues ethnic absolutism, a cleansing of the nation that depends on expelling—or killing—those deemed impure, be they immigrants, ethnic and racial minorities, religious minorities, the poor, the gender nonconforming, the queer and trans. If the fantasies are not of purity, then they are of strength, and those imagined to weaken the state must be eliminated.
iv.
Againism is consistent with repetition, with habit. I think of the multiple videos of people filming and describing their daily practices. “I eat the same meal every day.” “I go to the gym every day.” “I practice these aesthetic gestures every day.” Something about the rhythm of repetition speaks to againism’s fantasies of working across and often against time. Because I am consistent in a set of practices, I am warding off time. Look, at 65, I can still fit into jeans I wore when I was 16. All of this might not be againism, but it lives in the same neighbourhood.
v.
Even though “America” is excluded from my search terms, the current uses of againism cannot be detached from the fantasies of patriarchal nationalism by the U.S. administration.
But I want to mark something.
Againism is taken up after the U.S. 2016 election and adopted widely as a compelling rhetoric–and practice—before the current moment. I do not think it’s possible to detach the poison of U.S. againism from all present uses of againism. All calls to “make great again” are flavoured by U.S. frames.
vi.
I am particularly interested in what againism means when invoked by African organizations and countries. What ideas of the past are being used? How are they being used?
In 2022, Samuel Matekane was elected prime minister of Lesotho. During his inauguration speech, he promised to “Make Lesotho Great Again.”
He outlined six strategic goals:
Enhancing inclusive and sustainable economic growth and private-sector job creation
Strengthening human capital
Building an enabling infrastructure
Strengthening national governance and accountability for improved service delivery
Strengthening climate risk management, resilience, and adaptation
Strengthening public financial management
As one looks over this list of goals, one is tempted to ask about the temporality of that “again.” When was Lesotho great? Did Lesotho have any of these features before? Does great mean “famous” or “very good” or “distinguished” or “remarkable in effectiveness” or some blend of these? What anchors againism? What fantasies of Lesotho?
When William Ruto aims to “Make Kenya Great Again,” what is the comparison? What historical period anchors that claim of greatness? What achievements?
vii.
Perhaps the trick is that againism consolidates undeclared stuff. Againism has no historical references, and, perhaps, does not need them. Againism invites fantasy to fill in what is undeclared. Even as it revels in repetition.
viii.
We might turn to the U.S. now, where againism takes the form of patriarchal violence without consequences. Againism refuses justice claims by the minoritized. Againism—in the form of AI tech and its demands on the environment—turns away from claims that the earth should be protected and nurtured, claims central to Indigenous and ecological worldviews and practices, and shifts back to an earlier moment of industrial exploitation. Againism is a structure of repetition that depends on disavowal. Perhaps. Disavowal might not be the right word.
Againism is state violence against immigrants in ICE raids. I do not like to recommend poison, but I keep thinking about the stretch from about 1875-1924, when anti-immigrant legislation took shape in the U.S. It was bolstered by influential studies by people like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, who described immigrants as invaders.
I doubt that any of the ICE agents have read Grant and Stoddard, but they enact the anti-immigrant cleansing those two advocated.
ix.
If nostalgia leaves one suspended in an impossible past, where that suspension might lead one to attempt to recapture that past, againism insists on a present and future that repeat an imagined pastness. Pastness here might name a set of identifications—“when men were real,” “when women knew their place,” “when sex was sex, not gender,” “when minorities knew their place,” when lynching was a picnic day,” “when whiteness was rightness”—and it might also name a set of fantasies.
I believe—I am too lazy to check—one of the lines of the current U.S. administration is that white people “should not feel bad” about the past. There is an invitation to return to the days when postcards of lynching were sent as gifts, when collecting blackface dolls was considered charming, when white women could attack Black men without being filmed and called Karen and facing economic and social consequences.
Againism, in this sense, is a structure of feeling. Those invited to participate in it are asked to detach from any sense of responsibility toward history and justice. Asked, in fact, to detach from knowing anything that might produce discomfort. (I think, here, of the many teachers who describe their pedagogy as trying to make students “uncomfortable,” an aim I find weird, but that’s for another day.) Feeling right is more important than being right.3
x.
One of the principal effects—and aims—of againism is forming and sustaining transgenerational engagements. Those in the present look to the past—real and imagined—not simply to find models, but to identify with and as those they find in those pasts. These pasts are defined less by their fidelity to history and more to the idea of what they might have been: the manly warrior, the all-powerful father, the obedient wife, the happy family. Young men—well, men, in general—are told to be like their conquering ancestors, who range all the way from those who hunted mammoths to those who hunted lions to those who hunted humans.
Fantasy—spoken and unspoken—binds these transgenerational engagements.
Something is transmitted through these trangenerational engagements: at the very least, an orientation toward the world is created, or “righted,” turned toward proper feeling (pride, not shame, for instance). Expectations are generated about what the world owes one (fear, not contempt; respect, not disdain; reverence, not equality).
xi.
Is againism a subset of nostalgia? I am not sure. I don’t think so. It lives in the same neighbourhood, if only in the sense that it is a relation to the past that is brought into the present to do something.
If I were more Spivakian, I’d call these scattered notes.
On Wednesday 19 February 2025, Kenyan Senator M. Kajwang said, “I, as a leader of the Homa Bay delegation, I am willing to partner and work with all the leaders in this Republic who are willing to make Kenya great again.”
I don’t have research funds to hire people to run multiple searches on “great again.”
I am drawing from Lauren Berlant’s notion of the juxtapolitical: where right feeling substitutes for any acting.