Introduction: Allegory and Political Representation

Abstract

Allegory is always topical, but the mode seems closer to our experience of representative politics today than it has in many years. Thirty-five years after the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s important collection of 1981, Allegory and Representation, we write in the shadow of elections (in the United States, in Europe) and referenda (in Greece, in Britain) that have worked with figures and slogans meant to stand for existing collectivities or to establish them. Aliquid, the Scholastic maxim reads, stat pro aliquo: this stands in the place of that. This, a minority of the electorate in the United States, stands for that, a spectral, archaic figure of a great America to whose mythological features—Caucasian, orderly, safe—the unruly and disparate present and an equally unruly and disaggregated electoral majority must be made to conform. “Who will speak for England?” asked a headline in the Daily Mail in February of 2016, before the Brexit vote, borrowing, the tabloid said, a phrase used once before, in Parliament, to force Neville Chamberlain to “bow[] to the mood of the House” and declare war on Germany. Imagine: the native citizens of a sceptered isle, assaulted by what the Daily Mail’s editors call “mass migration,” prey to “a statist, unelected bureaucracy,” “unaccountable judges,” “a sclerotic Europe.” In the United States, the heartland is assailed by the twin specters of the illegal alien and the Islamic terrorist, each frequently a figure for the other, their hazy propinquity painting economic anxiety with the colors of post-9/11 national and religious terrors, and vice versa. And then there is a newly elected administration ciphering the bodies of those displaced, deported, dead as a figure for the shambling chimera of “America First,” in a farcical echo of Lindbergh’s 1941 rallying cry to isolationism, anti-Semitism, blood libel. Political allegory, then, operates