Weapons of Mass Recruitment: Populism, Online Humor, and Shamelessness in Far-Right Latin America

media release: UW Center for Visual Cultures event:

Lecture: Weapons of Mass Recruitment: Populism, Online Humor, and Shamelessness in Far-Right Latin America

Thursday, February 5, Memorial Library 126, 5 PM

This talk examines the humor circulated by far-right groups on Latin American social media platforms, focusing on Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia. Building on recent work on populism and online trolling, I argue that the recruitment power of right-wing comedy is best understood not simply through irony or anti-institutional rhetoric, but through a logic of “shamelessness.” I theorize shamelessness as an affective and performative tool: right-wing actors weaponize a refusal of shame to collapse moral critique, evasion of responsibility, and self-branding into a populist politics of exposure. Through memes, viral videos, and platform bubbles (e.g., WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter/X), far-right influencers cultivate brand identities that plug their followers into fragmented, prosumer-driven media complexes. The troll’s “é brincadeira” or “just joking” defense—exemplified by figures like Brazil’s Pablo Marçal—serves not only to recruit and mobilize supporters, but also to produce affective communities through shared spectacles of shamelessness. I contrast this with the left’s counter-humor which reappropriate the logics of meme and montage to resist far-right tactics. I reframe digital meme archives as documentary acts, capturing the fleeting logics of affect and genre that define today’s mediatized struggle over history, institutions, and collective memory. I propose that shamelessness is central to understanding the current transformation of populist media cultures in Latin America. As both right and left experiment with new forms of networked humor and strategic self-exposure, the struggle over collective identity and memory comes to hinge on how shamelessness is performed, circulated, and reappropriated.

Workshop: Race, Realism, and the Aural Politics of the Hollywood Soundtrack: New Approaches to Sound Hierarchies

Friday, February 6, University Club Rm 313,12 PM

This workshop focuses on a case study: the emergence and evolution of racialized sound hierarchies in early Hollywood sound cinema and the transition to synchronized film sound in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It reveals how technical and aesthetic developments in sound recording both reflected and entrenched racial, ethnic, and gendered boundaries. Analyzing the mise-en-bande or the orchestration of different audio components on the soundtrack, it traces how the industry’s drive for sonic coherence and narrative unity transformed foreign voices and accents into “ambient others,” often masking or erasing their presence through sound mixing, editing, and re-recording. In this way, it highlights both the experimental openness and ultimate closure of these early soundscapes, showing how the maturation of the classical Hollywood soundtrack became an engine of “whitening” and exclusion. In arguing that critical attention to who gets to speak and be heard remains central to the politics of cinematic representation, the workshop invites participants to consider how aurality and sound regimes more broadly serve as sites of racialized and other forms of power in their own scholarship and artistic practice.

Biography:

Nilo Couret is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. His book, Mock Classicism: Latin American Film Comedy, 1930-1960 (University of California Press, 2018), traces the popularity and cultural significance of film comedies from the transition to sound through the industrial studio period. His articles have appeared in several edited anthologies and peer-reviewed journals, including Film Quarterly, Film History, and Discourse.