[Commlist] new book: Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-states and Beyond: Symbolic Patterns and Interactional Dynamics

We would like to announce a recent publication from Routledge:


Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-states and Beyond: 
Symbolic Patterns and Interactional Dynamics (Routledge Studies in 
Modern History):


https://www.routledge.com/Ruler-Personality-Cults-from-Empires-to-Nation-States-and-Beyond-Symbolic/Postoutenko-Stephanov/p/book/9780367225353 
<https://www.routledge.com/Ruler-Personality-Cults-from-Empires-to-Nation-States-and-Beyond-Symbolic/Postoutenko-Stephanov/p/book/9780367225353>


Encompassing five continents and twenty centuries, this book puts ruler 
personality cults on the crossroads of disciplines rarely, if ever, 
juxtaposed before: among its authors are historians, linguists, media 
scholars, political scientists and communication sociologists from 
Europe, the United States and New Zealand. However, this breadth and 
versatility are not goals in themselves. Rather, they are the means to 
work out an integrated approach to personality cults, capable of 
overcoming both the dominance of much-discussed 20th century poster 
examples (Bolshevism-Nazism-Fascism) and the lack of interest in the 
related practices of leader adoration in religious and cultural 
contexts. Instead of reiterating the understandable but unfruitful 
fixation on rulers as the cults’ focal points, the authors focus on 
communicative patterns and interactional chains linking rulers with 
their subjects: in this light, the adoration of political figures is 
seen as a collective enterprise impossible without active, if often 
tacit, collaboration between rulers and their constituencies.


Table of Contents


Symbolic Patterns and Interactional Dynamics in Ruler Personality Cults: 
State of the Art and Open Questions

/

Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov

/

1. "Personality Cults": The Career of the Contested Notion

/

Dmitri Zakharine

/

2. The Mechanisms of Cult Production: An Overview

/

Xavier Marquez

/

3. Making the Cult of Personality from Bottom Up: The Case of 
Seventeenth-Century Mughal India

/

Ali Anooshahr

/

4. A Personality Cult against One’s Will? Traits and Trajectories of 
Popular Veneration of Emperor Alexander I (r. 1801-1825)

/

Darin Stepanov

/

5. Of Death and Dominion: Queen Victoria and the Cult of Colonial Loyalty**

/

John Plunkett

/

6. The Magic Mirror: Supplicant Letters and the Role of False 
Equivalences in Shaping Ruler Dominance

/

Eva Giloi

/

7. Father of the People, Face of the Nation: The Premodern and Modern 
Foundations of Ruler Personality Cults

/

Alexey Tikhomirov

/

8. The Image of Josip Broz Tito in Post-Yugoslavia: Between National and 
Local Memory

/

Tamara Trošt

/

9. Deification, Canonization and Random Signaling: Upholding and 
Sustaining Personality Cults

/

Kirill Postoutenko

/

10. ‘We Thank You, Our Beloved Leader!’ The Origins and Evolution of 
Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Cult of Personality

/

Manuela Marin

/

11. Embodied Practices of Leadership: The Case of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

/

Charlotte Joppien

/

12. Symbolic Patterns and Interactional Dynamics in Ruler Personality 
Cults: Responding to Questions and Formulating Ideas for Future Research

/Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov
/

/
/

/E/ditor(s)

/
/

//

/Kirill Postoutenko/ is Senior Researcher in the Special Research Area 
1288 (Practices of Comparison) at Bielefeld University, Germany, and 
Visiting Professor of Russian at the University of Besançon, France.


/Darin Stephanov/ is Guest Researcher at the Islamic Cultures and 
Societies Research Unit at Aarhus University, Denmark.


Contact: (kirill.postoutenko /at/ uni-bielefeld.de)

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