Towards the End of the White Guilt Era? The Rise of Nostalgic Whiteness and Magical Populism

Abstract

This essay probes into the rise and deterioration of multiculturalism in the West, paired with the notion of white guilt. It further explores the shift of the Western discourse to inform of the present-day conflation of populism and white nostalgia, which, this essay claims, may be the result of the end of the white guilt era and the subsequent rise to what I refer to as magical populism: a racial desire of the West to rewind globalisation in an effort to restore the lost sense of home and security of whites. The essay engages in a review of literature on critical post-theories, moving from the Frankfurt School to, among others, postcolonialism and postmodernism. It provides a trajectory of intellectual thinking as well as of the cultural dynamics from the end of WWII to date. It then explores how this trajectory fits into the current white political and cultural turn to scepticism over the multicultural paradigm with which to build Western societies in a globalised world. As such, this essay contributes to the study of whiteness in assessing the concept of white guilt in the West as advanced by Shelby Steele almost two decades ago.