The Digital Curation of White Nationalist Histories

The post-lunch session at the AoIR 2024 conference that I’m in is on historicising the far right, which clearly is a much-needed activity under current circumstances. We start with Kevan Feshami, whose interest is in white nationalism. White nationalist groups are themselves engaged in producing a narrative of their own history, in order to then be able to encourage their followers to be, or become, what they think their historical identity ought to be.

This project itself goes back hundreds of years. White nationalism is defined by a belief in a unifying racial identity; a perceived connection to land and space; and a fear of existential racial imperilment. Such nationalism is always imagined, it is everyday and linked strongly to emotion, and it has that emotional power because it provides its believers with a link with history and a sense of immortality.

In the absence of an actual white race, or a white ethnostate, this history must be created from scratch by white nationalists. This has been a project of many decades, drawing on a reinterpretation of historical and archaeological materials, pagan beliefs, and individual life stories; digital communication has turbocharged this project, and its longer-term persistence and replication has enabled greater scalability and searchability. The Internet has made the project of white nationalist history curation more affordable for its activists, too.

This is in part the work of archivists and translators, who dig up old materials and translate them into English for greater shareability; some of the Website operators are also connected to far-right publishing houses that collect and publish these materials in print form. Such work re-popularises almost-lost materials and returns them to circulation amongst white nationalists. This also extends to other media archives – including far-right music, radio broadcasts, zines, and newspapers, as well as geolocating white nationalists’ gravesites and other important historical locations.

In order to better understand these resources and their role in these movements, it will be important to study the public engagement with such content, and trace the use and interpretation of these materials by white nationalists, in much greater detail in future.