Postcolonial discourse, it seems, has in recent years been appropriated by the transnational far right. Be it through Russian claims of decolonizing Ukraine or the white supremacist conspiracy theory of the ‘Great Replacement’ of Europeans through migration, the far right has cherrypicked from anti-colonial theories to advocate for neo-colonial politics, combining emancipatory rhetoric and racist essentialism with conspiratorial modes of thinking. This talk explores this curious combination in Mike Stone’s A New America, a satirical novel that reimagines election day 2016 and Donald Trump’s rise to power as part of a spiritual battle between good and evil. Peppered with mid-2010s Alt-Right ‘edgy’ humor and racial slurs, the short text intertwines the age-old Jewish conspiracy theory with fears about the extinction of white US Americans. This talk argues that A New America presents a narrative of what David Higgins has termed ‘reverse colonization,’ where the historical beneficiaries of colonialism and imperialism – in this case white Christian Americans – are allowed to imagine themselves as the outnumbered underdog in an epic struggle against an oppressive force. In entangling Christian nationalist narratives of Trump’s first election as divine intervention with antisemitic conspiracy theories, racism, and American exceptionalism, Stone’s novel constructs white American identity as characterized by victimhood, and, consequentially, its bearers as entitled to righteous retribution. Inadvertently, though, the novel reveals colonial anxieties about the loss of white Christian hegemony and the United States’ status as the foremost global power, mirroring the rhetoric of the transnational far right, which has increasingly become grievance-based.

Sof Sabbioni is a postdoc researcher based at the University of Basel. After completing their PhD thesis on contemporary Russian and US American far-right fiction and authorial authority, they are now part of the SNSF-funded research project “Reading Right: Literature, Education, and Far-Right Activism” (2027-2031). Their research interests include far-right studies, literary sociology, postcolonialism, and contemporary US American literature and culture.