Trump and the Resurgence of American Noir

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2016vol2no2art617

Keywords:

noir, persona, U.S. politics, Donald Trump, mediated identity, hardboiled detective fiction

Abstract

This essay examines the political persona of Donald Trump as mediated by the imagery of hardboiled detective fiction and film noir. By evoking and distorting noir’s challenge to the status quo, its suspicion of systems of power and questioning of dominant norms, Trump has fashioned his political persona in ways that deliberately revise the popular conception of the hardboiled hero as brash-talking rebel at the margins of a corrupt system. Reading Trump’s persona through the mediating function of noir exposes how Trump’s rhetoric plays on, and benefits from, a theme of citizen estrangement while simultaneously reinforcing political expediency and self-interested power. Moreover, it is not only Trump who uses noir imagery provocatively to shape his political image. The media have also participated in crafting images of Trump as either entertaining disruptor or more darkly destabilising. As responses to crises of capitalism, corruption, and social fracture, noir narratives provide critical ways of investigating periods of disequilibrium and their resurfacing in the present. Analysing the production, expression, and reception of Trump’s political persona through the historical and discursive structures of noir underscores the salience of the study of persona to reveal underlying fissures in current American politics and society.

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Author Biography

  • Virginia Newhall Rademacher, Babson College, USA

    Virginia Rademacher is Associate Professor of Hispanic Literature and Culture in the Arts and Humanities Division at Babson College. She has published in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Ciberletras, Hispanic Issues, and Monographic Review, among other journals and books. Her current book project, “Lost in the Supermarket: Biographical Uncertainty in Contemporary Spanish Fiction” relates trends in biographical fiction to approaches to uncertainty and risk in fields such as business, finance, and law. 

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Political Persona

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Published

2016-12-07

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 2 (2016)

Section

Open Submission Articles

License

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How to Cite

Trump and the Resurgence of American Noir. (2016). Persona Studies, 2(2), 90-103. https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2016vol2no2art617
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