Updated Modernity: Decolonial Reflections on Nationalism and Ethnic Politics in Germany and Japan
Fri 17 Jul
|Room 712, Building 19, Waseda University
Drawing on a comparative analysis of Japan and Germany, Adolfo Zambrano explores how revisionist narratives of postwar history and online practices of othering shape contemporary ethnonationalist movements and contribute to the emergence of the global far right.
Date and Venue
17 Jul 2026, 17:00 – 18:30 GMT+9
Room 712, Building 19, Waseda University, Japan, 〒169-0051 Tokyo, Shinjuku City, Nishiwaseda, 1-chōme−21−１ 早稲田大学 西早稲田ビルディング
About the Event
Abstract:
This project examines Japanese and German ethnonationalist movements from a comparative sociological and historical perspective. It explores how nativist ideologies emerge and circulate in two societies with distinct historical experiences, migration dynamics, and symbolic frameworks, contributing to debates on the global rise of the far right. The proposed comparative study revolves around two mutually complementary axes. The first concerns understandings of history and revisionism, through which far-right groups in Germany and Japan carry out processes of othering based on nativist ideologies. I would like to examine how, despite the similarities between xenophobic discourses in both movements, there are important differences in the ways these tendencies engage in the revisionism of their postwar histories. The second axis concerns their online behavior. Although it is difficult to trace the membership of active participants in right-wing Instagram accounts and their affiliation with right-wing movements, it is possible to observe how ordinary internet…