Shifting Formations, Formative Infrastructures: Nationalisms and Racisms in Media Circulation

This introduction to the special issue departs from elaborating on the issues explored in a project examining right-wing politics and “debates” about racism in Finland. It situates the research gathered in the collection in terms of a shared focus on the disparate networks of organised and opportunistic cultural producers that invest time and labour in the production of racialising and othering discourse and aesthetics, and on the modes and forms of cultural and media production that have, in a relatively short space of time, come to be distributed and adapted across divergent socio-political contexts, and integrated to the situated forms of racism and nationalism given exclusionary force across and within them. It underlines the need to understand the motivated circulation of racializing discourse in the wider context of forms of “postracialism,” and the need for research to move past the paradigm of “hate speech” to get to grips with the significance and impacts of intensively circulated racist “noise.”