Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Cynthia Miller-Idriss is the author of The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany.

From her Q&A at the Princeton University Press website:

Why did you write this book?

I stumbled across the new forms of commercialization analyzed in this book while I was sorting through photographers’ databases in search of a cover photo for my first book. I was immediately hooked—fascinated by how much had changed in German far right subculture since I had completed my prior fieldwork five years earlier. The skinhead aesthetic that had dominated the youth scene since the 1980s had all but disappeared, and was replaced with mainstream-style, high-quality commercial brands laced with far right ideology, symbols, and codes. I planned to write an article about it, but the project wouldn’t let me go. I literally found myself waking up in the middle of the night thinking about the codes, trying to disentangle their meanings and wondering whether youth even understood them. I felt compelled to understand it, and that’s what led to this book.

How does the coding work within the commercial products?

The brands and products encode historical and contemporary far right, nationalistic, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and white supremacist references into...[read on]

Visit Cynthia Miller-Idriss's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Extreme Gone Mainstream.

--Marshal Zeringue