I.
Shuffle. In the history of music technology, this small button integrated into the Apple iPod in the early 2000s significantly changed the way we listen to music. Unbundled across artist, genre, region, and time period, music on shuffle was no longer constrained by the narrative sequencing of a pre-set album, but re-organized into non-linear constellations with new connections and meanings between songs.1 Be it revolutionary or disruptive, this mode of music playback set forth an epistemic shift.
This review essay draws on the broad cultural resonances of this tiny switch as its theoretical and methodological underpinnings. In this crisis period when critical vocabularies seem to have run out of steam, I envision re-shuffling as a method for re-synthesizing our conceptual tools at hand. Instilled with a spirit of radical rethinking, re-shuffling, as a cultural strategy of making art and theory, is about breaking disciplinary orders and reconfiguring our understanding in the face of dramatic sociopolitical changes. It starts with the idea that we have to reform the way we write, communicate, and relate to each other during dreadful times.2 This strategy trains our attention to hitherto covert and enigmatic corners brimming with unruly energies of politics and thought. From there lies the task of re-drawing connections of histories, spaces, and people beyond geographical and ideological zoning.3
This essay’s particular exercise in re-shuffling involves putting three vastly different books in dialogue, with each of the trailblazing works themselves presenting formidable undertakings of conceptual re-shuffling resonant with our contemporary times. On the surface, the three books appear hardly relatable: Agnieszka Pasieka’s Living Right is a cultural ethnography about how fascism and radical nationalism have become animating forces among youth activists in Europe since the 2008 Great Recession and the 2015 Refugee Crisis; Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta’s Together, Somehow theorizes the intimate publics and systemic barriers of dancefloor utopianism through its ethnomusicological engagement with contemporary nightlife scenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin; and Andrew Jones’s Circuit Listening recovers a wide-spanning history of the circulatory networks of global Chinese popular music divided by the Cold War.
Reading the three books side by side was a wild and crazy ride traversing the live scenes of folk and heavy metal in far-right gatherings, the sensual nightscapes of minimal techno and house with queer and progressive undertones, and the fractured Cold War-era music circuits of Hong Kong mambo, pirated Western rock, Taiwanese folk, and Maoist revolutionary songs.4
These contrasting and schizophrenic sonic worlds force key concerns about our moment of global politics to surface, however. As political divides grow so wide as to be reminiscent of Cold and Hot War divisions, how do we build dialogue, understanding, and ethical modes of being-together—especially with those who we don’t agree with—if war is not an option we accept? In a foreseeable future of worldwide economic downturns, far-right growth, diminishing geo-social mobilities, and higher education crises, how do we sustain spaces of deep humanistic inquiry? And how may media arts and theoretical criticism create conditions to re-shuffle these perilous realities?
: :
II.
As a critical point of entry, Living Right stands out as a lucid monograph of our time. Its subject matter—the transnational rise of far-right nationalism among youth—is one of the most alarming yet least understood of recent political phenomena. As Pasieka points out, far-right actors have often been depicted in news coverage as dispossessed, passive, and angry victims of global neoliberal capitalism. Many anthropologists—who tend to lean liberal themselves—avoid this thorny subject and even question whether it’s viable to study the far-right at all if one disapproves of them (and vice versa). Going against the grain, this book provides an important step for showing how far-right ideals are both ordinary and revolutionary for the growing populations who embrace them. As such, the book models a critical and ethical position from which to engage with radical difference today and respond to shifting political environments of far-right mainstreaming.
Pasieka conducted her fieldwork in Hungary, Italy, and Poland from 2016 to 2022, a key period that witnessed the right turn of European and world politics. As a left-leaning female Polish researcher who was pregnant twice during her fieldwork, Pasieka is forthright about the limits of her ability to fully engage in the hierarchical and masculine environments of the far-right activist groups discussed in the book. Still, her Polish identity allowed her to enter their transnational gatherings as a translator and understand the historical baggage of WWII cited by them.
Distinguishing grassroots mobilization from electoral politics, Pasieka puts emphasis on the concrete individuals who joined the far-right movement. Through her eyes, these activists emerge as vivid and complex characters. Some are deeply attentive to the study of history, philosophy, anthropology, and religion so that they can refashion transnational wartime fascist ideas into contemporary contexts as a revolutionary third path against both capitalism and communism. Some, fairly well-off, pursued far-right activism because of their “vicarious resentment,” an impulse to act for “disenfranchised, excluded, or passive others” (102) when economic problems were not solved by their governments. Some were so invested in social assistance programs like distributing free food to people of their own nationality that they were mistaken as staunch leftists. There are women who identify with far-right visions of community and redistribution of justice so much so that they are willing to submit themselves to the strict gender hierarchy of these groups.
Without downplaying the exclusivist nature of this movement, Pasieka stresses that so many young people in Europe today are drawn to far-right nationalism because it constitutes a basis of “camaraderie, friendship, growing together, [and] ethical becoming” to “reenchant the world” (15).5 Beneath this “conservative revolutionary” desire (39) is a wide sense of dissatisfaction with realities of rising unemployment and inflation, economic precarity, and security concerns that have been exacerbated multiple times by the 2008 recession, the 2015 refugee crisis, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2022 Russia-Ukraine War.
Published just days after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, this book also has relevance to the socioeconomic conditions of far-right growth in North America. By focusing on the agency of the far-right actors who have chosen their own political paths, this book timely reminds us that contemporary far-right nationalism is ideational, but not irrational. The development of this radical ideology is based on the mobilization of strong negative emotions for sure, but it is also highly organizational, infrastructural, and responsive to many people’s affective and accumulated sociomaterial needs.
No longer an outlier of contemporary global politics, this phenomenon demands a systemic re-thinking of how to engage with it conceptually, pedagogically, and institutionally. If we follow the political theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva’s observation that far-right ideology has only been suppressed in the past decades but remained immanent within the political architecture of Western liberalism, then the precarious moment we’re living today is simultaneously a critical flashpoint for rethinking and deconstructing a post-Cold War global historiography predicated on the triumphant narrative of liberalism and neoliberalism.6
: :
III.
Two groups that couldn’t be more dissimilar: far-right activists and ravers who dream of inclusive futures. What dialogue is possible?
Together, Somehow is one of a recent wave of books studying rave culture and queer nightlife against the backdrop of post-2020 polycrisis.7 The book begins with an overview of how the history of dance music is itself a history of political struggle, especially for queer, racialized, working-class, immigrant, and marginalized populations. From the emergence of disco as the symbol of gay liberation in New York City to the Afrofuturistic sounding of techno in the ruins of post-industrial Detroit, the rise of acid house raves in the 1980s UK as resistance against Thatcher-era recession, and the boom of EDM in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, a close relationship emerges between dance music and the struggle for concrete utopias.
Zooming in on the transatlantic music scenes of minimal techno and house in the late 2000s, Together, Somehow examines the “unfinished business of utopian belonging” (214). Taking Lauren Berlant’s “intimate publics” and José Esteban Muñoz’s “cruising utopia” as theoretical pillars, Garcia-Mispireta is mainly concerned with the incongruity between the utopian discourse of the dancefloor as an intimate place and its actual practices of exclusion, such as the discretionary nightclub door policies in Berlin and the risk of sexual aggression.8
To account for this dialectic playout of inclusion and exclusion, Garcia-Mispireta characterizes dancefloor togetherness as “liquidarity.” On the one hand, liquidarity is an emergent form of sociality supported by a specific kind of music-sensory-affective nexus. Affective and kinetic energy is transmitted through the combined experience of vibrating music textures, corporeal intimacy, and immersive material environments. On the other hand, liquidarity is built on “strategic vagueness” (102), which leaves vast room for under-addressed discriminations and violences in the very spaces that give dancers hope for an inclusive haven. With an epilogue that mourns victims of the 2016 Orlando Pulse mass shooting, which took place on a queer Latin Night, the book suggests that the dancefloor continues to carry markers of survival and suffering in the ongoing struggle for a more livable world.
Together, Somehow and Living Right have very different disciplinary vocabularies and citational communities. What they share, nonetheless, is a ground-up approach that focuses on the lived experiences and worldviews. Both books are situated in the geopolitical contexts of the Global North in the wake of economic, political, and ideological restructuring following the 2008 financial crisis. In the eyes of the clubgoers, far-right activists are extremely dangerous perpetrators of violent evictions from social and national community, but in Living Right we see members of far-right groups struggling with similar questions of survival, injustice, and belonging and, indeed, immiserated by the same force of economic restructurings. Are far-right believers and clubgoers that different? Multiple times during my reading, I had to control my urge to draw a diagram to compare and contrast them.
Importantly, a key difference between the two groups is the different power positions they traditionally occupy. Both bear the costs of economic downturn, but the far-right seeks to restore structurally privileged positions while minoritized clubgoers regularly endure more excruciating forms of exclusion tied to their structural positions in society and fight for spaces to breathe amid routine systemic violence.
It’s not accidental that far-right organizing and queer dancefloor utopianism are simultaneously surfacing as two of the most iconic cultural trends today—it’s telling of the schizophrenic pathologies of our time. The clash of interests, ideologies, and resource struggles between those different groups and their shared desire for radical alternatives are both deeply symptomatic of the larger neoliberal crisis in which vastly uneven economies can no longer supply survival needs of the majority while continuing to prioritize record profits for the few. In the 1930s, a similar pattern of economic and political problems occurred transnationally after the Great Depression. Humans responded with war and genocide. Is there a chance that we would figure out a better solution in this century?9
: :
IV.
Another shuffle.
In contrast to the abundance of affect in Living Right and Together, Somehow,Andrew Jones’s Circuit Listening offers a different texture through its archival approach and exhaustive writing style. A book about Cold War music and media history, Circuit Listening is thematically even closer to war and division, but it serves as a good reminder to take a step back from high emotional energies. It directs our attention to the structural constraints of geopolitics and technological change that shape media circulation and affective belonging during times of upheaval.
Traversing the disparate 1960s political terrains—Hong Kong and Southeast Asia as emerging intercultural centers under British colonization, Taiwan under Martial Law in the shadow of American military dominance and Japanese colonial legacies, and P.R. China in a separate world of socialist revolution—this book charts complex cross-border flows of media, migrants, and ideas beyond the Global North. It opens important questions: Can we tell a world history of media and politics without starting from the Global North metropoles and without boxing the conceptual transportability of other regions within the name of area studies? Can we find a method to capture the contrasting timbres of an era—from stringent political control to decolonial revolution, from the Maoist anthem “The East is Red” to the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love”? How do we recover traces of fleeting affects and soundbites when they have been so scattered and fractured by the larger forces of geopolitical structure beyond individual will?
To Jones, the key to understanding music mobilities in the “fractured topography of the global 1960s” (8) lies in a “revolution in miniature” (5) brought about by transistor technology. The popularization of transistor electronics like radio, television, record players, and public loudspeakers considerably enhanced the accessibility of popular music and broadened its circulatory networks. Of course, the geopolitical constraints of the time meant that the uses of transistor technology and the circuits of music trends were fragmented in different locales. In socialist China, transistors were mainly installed in the wired broadcasting system of rural areas, turning Mao into a “radiant medium” (3) through revolutionary songs. By contrast, in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the transistorization of portable devices allowed for the development of music piracy and genre trans-localization as well as counter-responses in search of local roots.
These hybrid experiences eventually gave rise to the Taiwanese campus folk movement and the making of the trans-Asian pop icon Teresa Teng 鄧麗君 in the late 1970s, leading up to a sea change of global Chinese popular music that accompanied the re-opening of China and the restoration of contact between the divided Chinese worlds in the late Cold War years. Up to then, the various undercurrents of popular music that took shape during the Cold War era of ideological blackout gradually opened up new modes of listening and heralded a period of structural change.
In sum, Living Right, Together, Somehow, and Circuit Listening together construct a world atlas of political affects and media flows from the transatlantic to the transpacific, from minor moments of dancing in the dark to grand periods of revolution, from specters of fascist and Cold War histories to structural dilemmas of the contemporary moment. They place different levels of emphasis between agency and structure, but they all undertake the extraordinary task of giving a shape to the amorphous flows of media and ideology so that the beats and pathologies of a time may become tangible. Together, they show that the most exciting global critical theory today speaks not for a camp or a canon but destabilizes existing paradigms of knowledge and offers a new language to account for enigmatic but palpable sociopolitical situations.
: :
V.
I return to my proposal for re-shuffling. Re-shuffling as a method of making art and theory, in my imagination, is born of impasse and capable of confronting impasse. It is a maneuver to take stock, re-arrange how contrasting ideas and groups dialogue with one another, and restore a space for thinking about how things fit into the larger picture. In other words, re-shuffling is a method of refashioning structural constraints into preconditions of change. It entails tinkering, reworking, re-connecting the dots, and re-designing infrastructures—all foundational strategies of renewing the humanities.
If the unprecedently peaceful period of the post-Cold War years (1989-2020) has allowed for the specialization of academic disciplines (as well as the specialization of “regions”), in this post-2020 crisis era it is of greater urgency to address our interconnected global realities and unstretch our canvas beyond disciplinary and geographical zoning. If border closure is the new form of globality today, what we urgently need is a new mode of global writing that can account for system-level change in global political economy and remap the twists and turns of transregional affinities beyond ideological divides. Re-shuffling is an invitation to locate such critiques of geopolitical change within actionable realms of media arts and reconsider the reverberations of ideas and struggles beyond symptoms of dread and division.
Furthermore, almost four decades after the canonization of postcolonial criticism in Global North academia, re-shuffling is a call for critically re-examining the extent to which we are still living in the penumbra of uneven epistemic and institutional ordering of knowledge production.10 Are we ready yet for a critical area studies that doesn’t stop at interrogating its own complicity in the Cold War and neoliberal histories, but also goes one step further by bringing the geo-cultural peripheries and ideological edges to the center of world-system critiques? In the face of planetary-scale pathologies and political re-ordering, are Asianists equipped to theorize the illnesses of the Global North that are inevitably bound up with the fate of the rest of the world? What would it mean to study the crisis of migration and radical nationalism in contemporary Europe and North America not simply as an issue of the Global North, but as a larger manifestation of the global postcolonial topography with deeper historical roots of “the intimacies of four continents”?11
Beyond the imagined dialogue in this essay, I have no confidence that the queer dancers of color in Together, Somehow and the far-right activists in Living Right would be willing to sit down for a conversation. However, as Andrew Jones vividly shows in the concluding chapter of Circuit Listening, the dissolution of the Cold War divide in the global Chinese world started sonically and psychologically with soldiers across the Taiwan Strait broadcasting sweet popular songs to the other side and people in the Chinese mainland gathering around radio-cassette players to feel the “transgressive thrill” (186) of listening to the seductive voice of the Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng. In other words, the sociopolitical opening of China in those late Cold War years began not in the streets but in the quiet corners of people’s living rooms and bedrooms through their privatized listening.
Globally during the same period, kids in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe also experienced the “transgressive thrill” when they listened to Western punk and heavy metal with boomboxes at home. Across the Iron Curtain, revolutions of various music genres from hip hop to house, techno, and synth-pop were also born in the bedrooms when young folks played around with the newly available turntables and synthesizers. These bedroom revolutions make me wonder if the domestic interiors during COVID-19 lockdowns were likewise less dead ends of suspended political agency than incubators of radical new energies among the younger generation today.
History will tell.
Until then, it is our fight to patiently write, dream, dialogue, and build our liquidarity in the dark.12
: :
Endnotes
- See different reactions in Leander Kahney, “Music Magic Found in the Shuffle,” Wired, April 16, 2004, https://www.wired.com/2004/04/music-magic-found-in-the-shuffle/; Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011). I thank Romina Wainberg for suggesting Retromania.
- For the politics of dread, see David Theo Goldberg, Dread: Facing Futureless Futures (Cambridge & Medford: Polity Press, 2021).
- For the politics of zoning, see Erin Y. Huang, Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).
- All the soundtracks in hyperlinks are discussed in the books, except that Living Right has only mentioned the genres of far-right music without identifying a specific soundtrack. I invite you to click onto these links and feel the different timbres of the songs and the books. I thank the digital format of ASAP/Review for making an interactive sound travel possible along with your reading of this essay.
- At the time when I put down this line in mid-August 2025, far-right parties topped the polls simultaneously in Germany, France, and Britain—the three main economies of Europe—for the first time in modern history.
- Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Untitled (Notes on Fascism This Time),” The South Atlantic Quarterly 123, no. 2 (2024): 418-428.
- For reflections on this trend of critical nightlife studies, see Chal Ravens, “The Academisation of Rave: Is Everyone Talking About Dancing, Rather Than Doing It?,” The Quietus, October 17, 2024, https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/black-sky-thinking/clubbing-dancefloor-utopia-raving-academia/; Lucas Hilderbrand, Kemi Adeyemi, Marie Cartier, et al., “The Night is Still Young: A Cross-Disciplinary Forum on Queer Nightlife Studies,” The Sociological Quarterly (18 Nov 2024): 1-23, doi: 10.1080/00380253.2024.2418365.
- Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
- The assassination of Charlie Kirk happened in the U.S. during the revisions to this essay and news commentaries projected a new era of escalated political violence and division. The main concern of this essay—the responsibility and tactics of critical theorization to re-activate political agency, dialogue, and imaginations of alternative futures against violence and despair—bears a new level of relevance and urgency.
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
- Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
- I am grateful for the good conversations with Arnika Fuhrmann, Eli Friedman, Romina Wainberg, Adhy Kim, Neil Cholli, Shariwa Oke, Anna Koshcheeva, Joshua Young, and Ackbar Abbas that helped me think through the three books and the conceptual questions in this piece.
Shiqi Lin