15 PUBLIC CULTURE 37:1 • DOI 10.1215/08992363-11714141 • COPYRIGHT 2025 BY DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Reading Fascists Reading Shakespeare: Literary Populism in White Power Fiction CHLOE AHMANN AND DEVIN PROCTOR Five days after he helped Donald Trump win the 2016 US presidential election, news broke that chief strategist Steve Bannon once penned a rap musical based on William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The play, set amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots, fea- tures a grisly war between the Bloods and Crips, who trade poetic spars like, “I’m an OG from the hood,” and “I will return to rep my peeps!” Rarely has Roman tragedy been such comedic fodder. Within weeks, Bannon’s collaborator leaked the script, and choice excerpts landed in the New York Times (Pollack-Pelzner 2016). By spring, NowThis (2017) had staged a table read with seasoned actors. Subscribers to Vanity Fair soon learned that this was Bannon’s second adaptation. During his fabled time in Hollywood, the would-be playwright pitched an intergalactic take on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (Desta 2017). Reporting on the play is, understandably, hilarious — a bit of light within a dark one hundred days when brazen White supremacists filed into the West Wing and fractured liberal norms with a ferocious speed.1 As newspapers mourned democra- cy’s demise and prophesied fascism’s rise in the United States for the first (but not the last) time in this century, stories on Bannon’s Shakespeare fandom broke from the seriousness of it all. What made them funny? Apart from Bannon’s tortured prose, the joke turned on an apparent opposition: here was a professional hothead in an emphatically lowbrow campaign for a candi- ESSAYS We wish to thank: the Cornell Center for Social Sciences and the National Science Foundation, for providing funds that supported our collective work; Akhil Mithal, for vital assistance in the early days of our investi- gation; cothinkers on a 2023 panel on the “mediators of marginalization,” where we first had the occasion to examine Gretchen’s Library; Jonathan Boyarin, Alex Dent, Victor Kessler, and Scott Proudfit for feedback that significantly strengthened our analysis; two generous reviewers who read the piece for Public Culture; Vyjayanthi Rao and Hyo Jung Kim for shepherding this piece to publication; and the entire editorial team. 1. We capitalize both Black and White throughout this manuscript, as we are writing about movements centrally concerned with racialized identity. ADVANCE PUBLICATION Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/doi/10.1215/08992363-11714141/2241972/11714141.pdf?guestAccessKey=0a829dc1-70d8-4f9f-91b4-d6b55755eaae by guest on 22 March 2025