The Alt-Right as a Community of Discourse

This paper suggests ways to examine the American Alt-Right as a community of discourse. It relies on Michel Foucault's notion that discourse is marked by external procedures of prohibition, division and will to truth, and it shows how the Alt-Right owes its powerful emergence in the public sphere to these procedures. It concludes with a brief recall that internal procedures also shape a community of discourse, by giving its actors access to commentary, providing the community with a sense of shared authorship and leading to a fellowship of discourse. This paper was researched and written before the Charlottesville fracas (12 August 2017) that propelled the Alt-Right into the limelight, and further obscured its discursive construction.