ABSTRACT
International Relations (IR) is increasingly appreciating aesthetics’ importance for world politics. However, IR scholarship has not comprehensively engaged kitsch. In this chapter, we highlight its necrogeopolitical functions, arguing that kitsch, interacting with the past, can both close off and open up spaces for participation. Critics claim that kitsch is ideological and emotionally manipulative, but apologists highlight kitsch’s subversive potential. When people associate kitsch with death, they can open up or otherwise participate in spectral spheres of power and resistance that have new dynamics, limitations, and opportunities than when kitsch depicts living objects. When specters haunt kitsch objects, they have new possibilities to frighten, to make absurd, to cause introspection, and to inspire. Haunted kitsch imbues new ironies, ambiguities, and ambivalences that can help interpret, resist, and critique hegemonic world-framings without the hubris of grounding such critique on an incontestable “Truth.” To illustrate this, we explore the necrogeopolitics of haunted kitsch pertaining to the specters of Communism, drawing on “hauntology” and “weak thought” to demonstrate how specters of Communism can (re)configure kitsch and vice-versa, consequently explicating new political opportunities.
